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Bad. I've enjoyed Halo Novels in the past, particularly Eric Nylund's work. This one is crap. I mean, it features blind, armless dinosaurs. The structure is predictable, a lot of the plot relies on contrivances that will make an active reader angry at the railroading, the characters act stupidly, and are just cliches and broad strokes. One of them is broadly characterised (As much as anyone in this shallow tripe is characterised) as stupid, and touches an obvious antagonist (Because they are in the rest of the series) that promptly mauls him to upset our actual protagonist, who alternates between remembering this and being sad, or forgetting this and being inconsistent. These two characters should actually have been merged. Characters drop out of the story for long stretches, and think unreasonable things (Like thinking monitors being bad is out of character, like, it's Halo, the first monitor encountered was 343 guilty-spark who tried to activate the first Halo and was antagonistic in sequels-this should be people's FIRST thought).

Everytime a gunshot happens off camera it is described as an "explosion". While true, this, and several other repeated poor choices of word, will become grating over time if you pay attention to prose.

There is no contribution to the rest of the setting or building on the rest of the world. This book is an utterly disposable one-shot entry to the series and is completely unnecessary in every manner. I was hoping the entire time that Halsey would show up because at least she was smarter than these characters, and wouldn't tolerate this bullshit.

The Halo novels are in general flawed, but while they may have structural issues, and the action is generally only worth one read through in most cases, they have ambition in lore and history and are generally compelling, with characters who you can at least comprehend the motivations of, who act in accordance with them.

(view spoiler)[This is the story of an AI who goes mad and decides to destroy the galaxy, the Sol system in particular, and the humans who decide to stop him, who ask for help from the Sangheili, who promptly kidnap them so we can have a destroyed ship/limited crew scenario. The original Halo was barebones, but the likes of The Fall of Reach explained how such a situation came about, and Halo 2 gave you reason to be in a similar position. This book expects a group of idiots kidnapping our cast and those idiots deciding very quickly to be ok with it to be enough of an explanation. "Oh, beauracracy would get in the way otherwise". It's the fate of the universe, even if the Sangheili take it into their own hands, surely they'd send more than one ship? It's contrived garbage.

The villain is a one shot, the only real character development we get is of a suprise protagonist halfway through, who is revealed to be probably the central character, who alternates between condemning the stupid, obviously insane enemy, and sympathising with him to the point of distress after he earns an obvious death, from a really poor cliche. (hide spoiler)]

Reread the Ghosts of Onyx.