Get ready for a very surprising book that has very peculiar attributes. First off, I don’t know why or how I just found out about this series. I believe I was led to it by Burn Enough’s Youtube video reviews and I’m glad I paid attention to what he said about this book. Strangely, he mentioned book 18 of this series which means I have a lot of reading to do.
In this book you’ll find the paragraphs very, very long. That also means most of the chapters are very, very long. I’m not sure I’ve seen a book written quite like this one. It seems once I started a chapter, that chapter was never going to end. Yet, this book is very interesting. And it goes from the bad to the good over a long period but it seems like just a short amount of time has passed.
Joe Bishop is our main character and you’ll learn quite a bit about him. He starts out as a 20 year old US Army Specialist (E-4) home on leave from peacekeeping in Nigeria of all places. And as usual, “peacekeeping” for the Army means killing lots of bad guys who happen to be labeled as such for this hour, this day. So what’s so special about Joe Bishop. Well for one he’s soon going become a full Colonel in the same US Army. Now that in itself is just about impossible, but things are going to happen very fast now that the Ruhar have invaded Earth!
The Ruhar are fuzzy, furry aliens, a.k.a. “Hamsters”, that have invaded Earth and have been destroying very specific things. They are attacking physical plants that provide power to every region of the world. They are knocking down bridges when they find them, but as it becomes very apparent, they are not trying to kill humans. In fact, they do a very credible job of avoiding humans and only shoot back when shot at. So Earth is about to be knocked back to pre-industrial era. Most of our electrical power generating capabilities are gone and those large facilities were now deep craters when the Ruhar sent down railgun rounds which pretty much obliterate anything on the ground in its vicinity.
Joe has no idea why the Ruhar are attacking Earth, yet he knows he swore an oath to defend his home land, so he gathers up some like minded locals and they start trying to fight back. He and his band of irregulars manage to capture a Ruhar and turn it over to the military. So he figures he’s done a pretty good day’s work but there were more Ruhar to fight.
That’s when everything changes again! The Ruhar are attacked in space and on Earth by another alien species called the Kristang. They pretty much wiped out the Ruhar invasion force, rounded up the remaining Ruhar on Earth and told humanity that they just saved everyone from a life of slavery to the Ruhar. Now the Kristang were not pleasant to look at even though very few humans got to see one. They were eight foot tall lizards, very muscular and not at all friendly. They issued most of the military these zPhones which came with an interpretation AI so English was translated to Kristang and Kristang to English.
Everyone on Earth thought the Kristang were the good guys and they had saved humanity’s bacon. The Kristang said that Earth was kind of a useless planet and if we wanted them to stay around in case the Ruhar came back then we needed to help them out by supplying ground troops for some other planets that needed occupied. That’s how the UNEF (United Nations Expeditionary Force) was formed and it included soldiers, airmen, and Marines from all different countries. Specialist Joe Bishop part of the 10th Mountain Division that was part of UNEF. He was going into space and to another planet. That was almost too much to comprehend.
So, the Kristang took this human fighting force off Earth, through a war-gate and to a very, very distant planet. That planet was populated by none other than the Ruhar, but they had been conquered since most of them were only farmers. Those farmers had further agreed to leave the planet as soon as evacuation arrangements could be made. The humans were going to act as occupation forces making sure the Ruhar did what they were told. This is where Joe Bishop gets his first promotion to Sergeant.
Sergeant Bishop also gets to see the Ruhar as they are and starts getting information from them that things aren’t as nice as they seem. While the Kristang are Earth’s allies, it’s not an equal association. The Kristang have a lot of contempt for the humans and human soldiers in their eyes are very weak. They don’t trust the humans to fight alongside them and certainly are going to give the humans any kind of advance weapons! In fact, the Kristang aren’t giving the humans on this planet called Paradise anything. Oh, they do deliver humans food now and then, but it’s obvious they don’t want to waste resources on doing that since they have to travel all the way back to Earth to collect the supplies.
Anyway, Joe Bishop begins to realize that he and his fellow humans might have gotten on the wrong side of this war between the Ruhar and the Kristang. But without the Kristang, Joe and his fellow humans have no way of getting back to Earth. Still, in this book, Sergeant Joe Bishop will get promoted to Colonel, and then scheduled for execution!
You’re going to enjoy very much how he gets out of this situation. There is humor in this book and most of it comes towards the latter part where Joe meets something very, very unexpected. Just wait for it!
I’m definitely going to continue with this series and I’ve already got book 2, “SpecOps” on my reading list.
==[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.]==