Chasm City

I just finished Chasm City. I kinda liked it but it also made me grumpy. Especially having read virtually all the Jack Reacher books, which are stunningly well-written. In any case, Chasm City, at 694 pages (and small-type, densly-packed text pages at that) it's about 2/3ds too long. Sometimes I felt that characters had goggles just to make them more steam-punk-y. Furthermore, there are too many characters desperate to do stuff which just doesn't matter. Who cares which ship gets to "Journey's End" first? How could that possibly matter? And, as it turns out, it doesn't. But that's an entire subplot.
Image.