This series should have ended in the last book, I think. Scrapper Hank Spears and his old friend, Lara the Bounty Hunter, plus a bunch of other friends managed to defeat Codename: Extinction in the last book. That should have been the end. But now we find out there’s something else out there that has to be dealt with.
This book doesn’t deal with it! No, Hank and Lara spend their time fighting enemies in their past. Lara, like Hank, was an orphan and didn’t know much about her family, why they abandoned her as a small baby, but now she’s going to find out she does have a much larger family than she though. And, those family members seem to want to kill her!
Hank has been celebrating the defeat of Codename: Extinction with his army of Peacers led by General Ammo. They are all back at Suniuo Relay Station relaxing and getting drunk in celebration. Eventually everyone starts to sober up and decide on what comes next. General Ammo tells Hank that her and her Peacers need to move on and find more of their kind to create an even bigger army. She tells Hank that he’s owes them one so if Gen. Ammo ever needs his help in a fight, he has to heed that call and come running. Hank agrees but only if it’s something he wants to get involved in and that would mean it has to do with defeating Twain.
Twain is a rouge AI behind a lot of the problems in the galaxy. He’s building an army for himself but it’s made of modified humans done against their will. What he’s done is inhumane and must be stopped. Hank just doesn’t know how he’s going to do that right now.
So, this is where the story kind of falls completely away from the above objective, i.e., find and destroy Twain. Lara leaves their secret lair, Suniuo Relay Station, and heads to who knows where. She doesn’t say bye or nothing to Hank but Hank and Imogen are bound and determined to find her and make sure she stays safe. They are joined by Clynt, the Vekrass thief, and eventually do find Lara as she’s about read to assault one of the most powerful crime bosses in the galaxy. They can’t persuade her to not do this, so they join in, but she’s made sure they know this is her business and she’ll handle it.
She eventually does handle this part of her problems, but we all know there is more. Once again she leaves their secret lair, but this time she tells Hank that he’s not to follow no matter what. Hank doesn’t have a choice but to do what she says when he gets a call from Ammo and she needs his help. She needs to break some of her people out of a Consortium prison. A simple straightforward job but of course it doesn’t turn out that way. Still, Hank goes off to do that.
So there’s going to be a lot of fighting against enemies that are not Twain. They all really get sidetracked even when Twain blows up half of Pram, a planet where Imogen’s Uncle Vince resides. He’s not harmed but he still can’t convince his other government associates that Twain is a real threat.
Anyway, in all this, we find that Inquisitor John Gregory has returned! Yeah, he’s the guy that Imogen sliced his head off when she met up with him aboard the *High Cloister* which was supposed to have been blown up! So now it looks like we’re all back to fighting the same bad guys we had previously defeated in the last several books. Still, the story is well written and there’s lots of action, but none of this advances the fight against Twain. Maybe they’ll get back to that in the next book?
Book 8, “Bounty Hunted”, is now available on Amazon.
==[Note: As of 12/03/2023, this will not be published on Amazon since I have been banned from posting reviews for some unknown reason. Once the ban is lifted, assuming it does get lifted, I’ll go back and post this to Amazon.]==