New author and a requested read/review which I like doing very much, especially when the book is as good as this one. It has a strange, but not unbelievable plot that’s really not revealed until the end. I didn’t figure out what was going on until after I had read the book and that’s a very good thing.
Our main character is Derek Willinger, a very unhappy soldier. This is Earth far, far in the distant future, I hope. Derek is a member of a Force Conversion squad on a mission to find all the “mals” he can and convert them. “Mals” is a shortened term for a group of people, not all of which are extremely religious. All Derek knows is that he doesn’t like what he and his squad are doing.
Military men are not always right in the head. They can and often are exposed to too much horror and violence which makes it difficult for them to tell right from wrong. It’s a mental state which is hard to recover from. After all, we start out as civilians being taught that killing is wrong. Yet, when we go into the military, you find out that killing is what you’re supposed to do, except you have to only kill the enemy. In Derek’s case, anyone not part of the Forced Conversion Forces are the enemy. Unfortunately, the other members of Derek’s squad seem to have all become mentally unbalanced and are enjoying the killing way too much.
Then something unexpected happens. A “mal” catches the squad unprepared for the trap she has set. Most of the squad isn’t coming back from this mission. Still, this mal has to make sure none of them come go back to their base since they were way too close to Sanctuary! That’s where she’s from and a whole lot of her friends reside there. If the Forced Conversion squad found them, there would be a lot of killing and forced conversion.
Now what is “forced conversion”? Well, it’s an interesting concept which I can see happening in a really bizarre world in the future. The author has really hit upon a unique idea that will make you think. Could this be our future? I don’t really know. Maybe it’s already happened? I just don’t know!
Well written book with hardly any errors. Good editing and story telling.