The Good Guys Review: Eric Ugland's Montana Problem

I heard fourteen books of The Good Guys before I stopped, out of sixteen as I write this, with two more arriving since, acquired during one of Audible's ninety-seven-percent-off fire sales. I am glad I paid a dollar and change per book, and that sentence is most of the review.

Let me be fair about the craft first, because the easy version of this review would not be. Ugland is not a bad writer. The prose is serviceable, sometimes decent, occasionally good. The world has real thought in it: distinct cultures, a sense of geography, politics that would reward attention. Neil Hellegers narrates it gamely and is one of the reasons I got as far as I did. There is a version of this series I would have recommended.

The shape of every book

Here is the pattern, and once you see it you cannot stop seeing it.

You get a snippet of actual series plot. Something moves. A thread you have been following for several books finally twitches, and you sit up, because this might be the one where it goes somewhere.

Then Montana leaves on a side quest, and the side quest is the rest of the book.

He usually comes back with something: a title, a piece of powerful loot, occasionally both. And then that thing does not matter. It is lost, or it is forgotten, or it simply never comes up again. In book one he is granted god-tier weapons by a god he personally knows, and he loses them permanently, and nobody ever pulls that thread.

An arc is supposed to change the situation. If the reward at the end of the arc is discarded before the next one starts, the arc changed nothing, and the hours you spent on it bought you nothing. When acquisitions do not matter, pages do not matter.

The champion who never came

If you want one plotline that shows what this series does with its own promises, it is this one.

Another god hands Montana an extraordinary prize for his city. His patron god then explains the catch, and the catch is a good one: the prize is so far above the permitted scale that she was not allowed to give it to her own champion. Handing it to Montana is the loophole. And the consequence, spelled out to him plainly, is that every god's champion is now coming for his stronghold to take it off him.

That is a real setup. It gives the series an engine, a clock, and a reason for the next several books to matter. I sat up.

Not one champion has arrived.

I heard fourteen books and the threat that was explained to me as inevitable simply never happened. Meanwhile the plot that started in the opening books, the question of who ends up on the throne, is still unresolved. Judging by the two volumes released since I stopped, it is unresolved sixteen books in. Every book adds a divine thread on top of that, and the older threads do not close to make room.

At some point you stop reading a story with a destination and start reading a soap opera, and the difference is whether anything is ever allowed to conclude. My honest read is that more than half of each book is a side quest for something that will not turn out to matter, and that at this rate the series has no ending in it.

The bag of holding

If I had to hand somebody one detail to explain this series, it would be the bag.

Montana loots everything. He has a bag of holding stuffed with the results, including master-crafted swords and genuine magic items. What he never does, across multiple books, is figure out how to organize it. So he reaches in and thinks "sword" or "weapon", and the bag hands him whatever answers to that, which is usually some rusted thing he picked up off a corpse nine chapters ago.

The rusty axe breaks after two swings. He panics, reaches in again, and comes out with a sharpened wooden chair leg he is now using as a spear.

This is played as comedy and it is a running gag with real staying power, so I understand why people enjoy it. But look at what it does to the stakes. His difficult fights are difficult because he is fighting with furniture while carrying the answer on his hip. The tension is not coming from the enemy or the world or any choice he made under pressure. It is coming from an inventory management problem the character has declined to solve for over a decade of publishing.

That is the series in one image: a man with the solution within arm's reach, having a hard time anyway.

The dial

The bumbling-buffoon defense would work if the books committed to it. They do not.

Whenever a scene requires competence, Montana is suddenly and secretly cunning. By the next chapter he has reverted. He is as clever as the author needs him to be and no cleverer, and the books are open about this: at one point he admits to playing dumb deliberately to get out of his leadership responsibilities. So the idiocy is not a trait, it is a costume, and the story puts it on and takes it off as required.

The same thing happens with the people around him. He has advisors. They give him sound advice. He ignores it, and the plot proceeds as though ignoring it were a reasonable thing to have done.

I want to be precise about the complaint, because "the lead is dumb" is not a review. If Montana were consistently stupid and stupidly overpowered, I could forgive it. That is a real subgenre and it works when an author commits. What I cannot forgive is a character whose intelligence is a plot variable, because it means nothing he does can be anticipated, earned, or admired. You are not watching a person navigate a world. You are watching a dial get turned.

The smell

I know I lean on this and I am going to lean on it once more, because I have never found a faster route to disliking a protagonist.

Montana does not bathe unless somebody complains. This is established and re-established. He wanders his own noble court dressed like a vagrant. He walks around crusted in gore long after the fight has ended. Other characters routinely have to tell him that he cannot meet the king, or attend a noble, or go on a courting date, until he washes, because he reeks.

Nobles pursue marriage alliances with this man while the text keeps reminding you what he smells like.

Some readers find it endearing. I found that it poisoned everything else. A protagonist can be violent, selfish, stupid or cruel and still be compelling company, and this genre proves that constantly. What is hard to spend fourteen books with is somebody the other characters keep having to ask to wash.

Where it lands

D. Not worth the credit.

Not because any individual book is offensive, and not because the writing is incompetent. It is neither. It lands here because fourteen books produced a protagonist I actively did not want to follow and a plot that had not moved, in a world that genuinely deserved better than both.

If Ugland is a gap in your reading you want to close, The Bad Guys is the one to try, and only its early run. If you want the argument about why none of these threads pay off, that is the shared-world piece, which covers all twenty-four books I heard.

Verdict

Not Worth the Credit. Hellegers deserves better material, and so does the world.