* ClicheStorm: The series tends to fall into a lot of tropes and cliches. Villains tend to be LargeHam ObviouslyEvil types with takeover the world plans. There's decent amounts of PlotMandatedFriendshipFailure. Plenty of spy one-liners both good and bad. AllAsiansKnowMartialArts. The list goes on.
* EnsembleDarkhorse:
** DrillSergeantNasty Corporal Keene is a decent supporting character, especially when he goes out into the field.
** Of the team members, Jen is surprisingly iconic for being an ActionGirl with a DarkAndTroubledPast despite only being in three (or technically four) of the twelve books.
* FirstInstallmentWins: The first two books are considered to be the best ones by some fans.
* TheyWastedAPerfectlyGoodCharacter: There are fans not at all happy with the death of [[spoiler:Jennifer]] in general, and the fact that it happened only halfway through her promising DayInTheLimelight in particular.
* WhatDoYouMeanItsNotForKids: It's a very YA series, with plenty of brutal deaths and sexuality references, but the title can make it sound lighter than it is, and when the first book came out, it found its way into some elementary school book fairs.
* WhatDoYouMeanItsNotPolitical: The plot of Edward Red seems to mimic the very real contemporary problem Britain has over what distance they should maintain, if any, from the rest of Europe, as well as the issue of becoming a part of the global European currency.
* WhatDoYouMeanItsNotSymbolic: In the plot of ''Jake Black'', the [[BigBad Big Bad's]] plan is to [[spoiler: merge an alternate, "chaos" dimension with ours, causing the world to be submerged in darkness. The final battle between him and Jake takes place on a bridge that extends over the top of this surging darkness Bearing in mind that the entire plot of the story so far has revolved around whether or not Jake would finally descend into "darkness" and kill the villain...yeah.]]