Read Time: 3 Minutes
Shady Greg, with a terminal case of the stupids, returns and manages to blunder his way through yet another troubled time for his business. Shady Greg is both the savviest entrepreneur in the world of Jadera and also the most gullible and naive person who ever lived. After making and losing his fortune in the years following the events of the first book, Greg is once again on the ropes.
Word has come down that the system is about to unlock a new area, so the merchants and adventurers are swarming to the location to get prime real estate and claim the bragging rights for conquest.
As luck would have it, Greg stumbles upon a dungeon core that hasn’t yet spawned a dungeon around it. He claims it as his own and manages to convince the system to follow his suggestion to put a storefront over the entrance, where he can charge admission and bilk every coin out of the adventurers.
He even adds a gift shop that dungeon divers must pass through to get out. Like I said, what a scumbag! 😀
At this point, he should have been renamed Scumbag Greg, but everyone loves what he has done. Even when he gets the dungeon to drop shop tokens instead of gold, he still manages to stay popular. Greg is making pure profit, as he doesn’t have to pay for anything—the dungeon respawns the stock for the gift shops, handles security, and pretty much automates everything else.
Having dealt with the crooked Briarsons from the first book, Ameira, the daughter of Paul Briarson (the main bad guy from the first), has taken over the Briarson Emporium and is seemingly just as corrupt and double-dealing as her father.
Everything Greg manages to achieve, Ameira snatches from him and does ten times better. And he never learns. He keeps bumbling into success, only for someone else to ruin it for him.
Locke and Caliban are adept at writing truly villainous bad guys that you can’t help but hate with a burning passion, even when the main character, Greg, is a bit of a twat as well.
The story is fun and easy to follow. It’s not too complicated, though at a little over seven hours, it felt rather short, and I finished it in a single day. The pacing was good, without any real dull spots that bogged things down.
Like the first book, the narration was a little underwhelming. It wasn’t bad, per se, but I couldn’t help but think a different narrator could have elevated the story a few notches.
One thing that did annoy me was that I didn’t notice that all three books in the series are now available in a single volume. It was labelled as “Book 4,” which I assumed was a continuation of the series. So yeah, Shady Greg has got a few extra coins from me, but if you haven’t gotten into this series yet, then “Shop in Another World” is better value for money.