Dead or Alive

By: Derek Landy

Narrated by: Kevin Hely

Skulduggery, Valkyrie and Omen return in the 14th and penultimate novel in the internationally bestselling Skulduggery Pleasant series – and their most epic test yet…

In a matter of days, the world will change.

Billions of lives will be wiped away in a final, desperate search for the Child of the Faceless Ones — she who is destined to bring about the return of humankind's ancient overlords.

To prevent this, Skulduggery Pleasant and Valkyrie Cain have one last – terrible – option: the assassination of Damocles Creed. With protests stirring in the magical city of Roarhaven, with riots and revolutions on the horizon, Valkyrie must decide who she wants to be: the hero who risks everything for a noble ideal, or the killer who sacrifices her own soul for the fate of humanity.

The decision must be made, and time is running out.

©2021 Derek Landy (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

As always a great read

If you're this far I to the series, then you already know why these books are so good.
This book doesn't disappoint.

very funny

super funny, had me laughing out loud, the story is decent. the narrator is no way near as good as the one that has previously narrated skulduggery pleasant but he was ok

It's basically the MCU at his point

I can go on and on about how Landy doesn't know what to do with a good plot anymore even if he accidentally stumbles into one, with this book's promising start that he completely botches being a prime example, however I am instead fascinated to dive into the best analogy I have for the series' downfall after the 9th book: it's just like the MCU. Now, we can disagree on when it happened exactly, but we can all agree the MCU ended up falling from grace post endgame. The movies end up spiraling into the rehashing of old plots, witty oneliners and impressive battle scenes with zero imaginative breaking of the status quo, all sense of innovation, attention to detail, ambition or straight up heart fully vanished. This is exactly what these books feel like. "Dead or Alive" in particular is "The Eternals" at worst and "Quantumania" at best, make of that what you will.

At least the narration slightly lessened the damage from this overall failure of literature.