Review: Vendetta: Legend of The Iron Warrior Vol. 3 by T.V. Holiday

The third installment of a savagely unique series, Vendetta by T.V. Holiday holds nothing back as the Iron Warrior is drawn back from sabbatical for his greatest challenge yet.

When the titular hero receives a call that his crew needs help, he returns to the Seventh City for another clash of biblical proportions, heeding the call of his own loyalty to justice and peace. His time away was supposed to give him space to work on his faith and rid himself of any remaining demons; he has worked through the darkness and fear that once dominated his heart, and strengthened his will to walk the path of discipline and grace, but a sinister enemy is back to wreak havoc on the place he calls home.

Driven mad by a desire for vengeance, Candace Loveless is viciously targeting those on the Carnage Coast close to Travis, in the hopes of revealing the identity of the city’s champion, drawing him back to an evil path of violence, and exposing him as a fraud. Travis must walk the fine line between righteousness and rage if he wants to protect the ones he loves, without losing himself all over again.

Carnage Coast’s crew of heroes is divided as the bodies of their allies begin to drop, and the smear campaign against the Iron Warrior threatens the future of every soul in the city. A merciless team of villains has gathered, guided by the resident evil of Luc, who knows the weakest point in Travis’ seemingly impenetrable armor – the fate of his friends and brothers in arms. In this winner-take-all war of ideals and integrity, nothing is sacred, every line will be crossed, and the fate of Heaven, Hell, and humanity hangs in the balance.

Beneath the dastardly plot and extravagant characters, the writing probes deeper into critical themes of vengeance, patience, trust, and forgiveness. At times, however, the action sequences can feel muddled or tough to follow, with their swirling melee of supercharged characters and lightning-fast progression, so some reworking of the prose could make these dynamic scenes more visceral and vivid. In general, the writing can be inconsistent, vacillating between brilliantly biting to stilted and stereotypical.

While religious fiction can be more blunt in its parables and lessons, the thematic throughlines can feel overly leading – specifically, discussions around faith, mortality, and the strength of one’s belief feel shoehorned into the natural flow of the story. Of course, these issues strike at the core of the plot, as well as the premise of the series on the whole, but they could be integrated more seamlessly into character interactions to avoid the prose seeming more like a sermon than fiction. On a final technical note, there is a tendency to repeat words and phrases in close succession, which could be easily remedied for more variety and engagement.

Despite these execution issues, some of which have been around since the first installment, Holiday delivers an original tale of redemption under fire with a spectacular dose of action.