Terminal Uprising – Jim C. Hines

Entertaining, but not as good as the first book, “Terminal Alliance”. And I couldn’t tell whether a third book is intended, which says something.

In the previous book, Mops and her crew learned that the disease that destroyed Earth’s civilization and most of humanity was not self-inflicted, but was brought by the aliens who are ostensibly reclaiming humanity, albeit as shock troops. (Actually, the truth is more nuanced. The introduction of the venom that started it all was an alien accident, and the conversion of that venom to a plague was a human accident. The reason this is a burn-before-reading secret is not clear.) In this book, evidence that there may be a real cure for the disease bring them to Earth itself.

The humor that accompanied the first book is still present - but it is no longer fresh. The same things go wrong (or right) in the same ways. What was funny in the first book is present in the second book, but it is no longer as new or as funny. What is left is fairly-well-written slapstick.