I really enjoyed the first book in this series and I have wanted to read the rest of it for a while. I bought the whole series through Kobo just to ensure that I’ll eventually get around to reading them some day.
Synopsis: Predator’s Gold picks up two years after the end of Mortal Engines, with Hester and Tom still flying the Jenny Haniver across the globe from traction city to traction city. They have a pretty good business going, until they take on a passenger who seems to be more trouble than he is worth. Tension forms between the young couple when they become stranded on one of the great ice cities and must wait for their airship to be repaired. Tom misses his old life on a city and seems to be settling in well, leaving Hester to wonder if she is going to loose him entirely.
One of the things that I really liked about the first book in this series was that it didn’t focus so much on the relationships forming between different characters. Insta-love wasn’t a real thing, and Hester and Tom were more focused on surviving than becoming a couple. Although I realize that they have had time to become more romantic, it was a bit of a disappointment to see how much their relationship played into this story. Key pieces of this story hinged on their romance, which actually made this book feel like more of a teen book than the previous one. Hester was no longer the bad-ass female assassin bent on revenge, and instead spent an unhealthy amount of time being concerned about whether Tom was going to leave her for someone prettier.
There were definitely some very cool parts of this book, including the introduction of The Green Storm, a military spin-off group of the anti-tractionist movement. I’m also really curious about The Lost Boys, and how they will play into the rest of the series as a group of wandering thieves. The world building in this series is truly amazing. I definitely can’t fault the author on his ability to create a completely new and interesting dystopian world that isn’t like anything else in the YA market. I’m definitely going to keep reading the series, but I hope that we get back to the more adventurous stories and steer away from the romance-y bits.
LC rating: 
(pretty good book)
The Literary Counsellor 