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geofroggatt's review
2.0
I was excited to read this book but slow to follow through with it because this book was the only book from the Final Destination spin-off books that I was able to get my hands on physically. This book review also mentions spoilers from Final Destination 2. When Annie Goodwin travels to the desert oasis of Las Vegas, she hopes to turn her luck around. Life's dealt her a bad hand and her current luck seems to be no different. But when Annie has a premonition of a terrible accident, she takes steps to stop it from happening. Annie and four other people survive the ordeal and cheat Death. In a town where the odds are always in the house's favour, can Annie hope to beat the Reaper in this game when she's drawn the Dead Man's Hand? I loved the setting of Las Vegas. I was glad that the foreshadowing to the main disaster in this book was done better than in the previous book that I read in this series, Final Destination: Looks Could Kill. In my opinion, the prologue sets the tone for the novel, but it could have easily been cut out of the story and nothing would have changed. There was a mention of two characters falling for each other on a rollercoaster, and the character briefly thinks about how it must be rare for two people’s lives to be changed while on a rollercoaster. I like to think that this was a cheeky reference to Final Destination 3. I found that this book was slow to start, and it took too long to get to the main disaster. This was similar to another book in the series, Final Destination: End of the Line, however, unlike that book, this book didn’t spend that time making me care for the main cast of characters as much. I appreciate the attempt at a change in formula, but by having the main disaster occur halfway through the book, this book felt like it was meandering for the first 200 pages and then rushed to the end in the back half of the story. I think that this book proves that the main disaster should shape the entire main plot, and that that is the only part of the Final Destination formula that should remain untouched when writing these stories. I think the author did a decent job at introducing these characters, but I wasn’t as compelled or interested by them as other Final Destination casts in previous stories, especially since these characters didn’t shine enough to justify focusing on them for 200 pages before the main disaster. I think the most egregious mistake that this book makes is having the survivors die out of order and different from the order they should have died with no explanation as to why that is. There was an opportunity to do something similar to Final Destination 2’s change in formula with the order of deaths occurring in reverse order to how they should have died in the accident (which was Death’s way of tying up loose ends caused by the butterfly effect created by the survivors from the first Final Destination), which was one of my favorite new ideas in the whole franchise, but no attempt was made to explain or justify this change in formula here. The deaths weren’t very creative in this book, and I found that the HIV death was inaccurate and weak. Even for the time that this book was released, HIV wasn’t a death sentence, and overall, it just didn’t fit in with Final Destination as a franchise. I think the idea of a protagonist or final character contracting a deadly virus and slowly dying and being unable to take their own life is an interesting concept, but using HIV as that virus was just ineffective and in poor taste in this novel. Overall, the first half of this book dragged on too long and the ending was too weak. This might be my least favorite entry in the book side of the Final Destination franchise, which makes me sad because it is the only book in the series that I physically own.
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