Rating:

5 Small Stars
New Frontier

I am reading a lot of Joshua Dalzelle’s books lately. He’s got this Omega Force series that I’ve been working on and I’m up to the fifth book in that series. Here he starts a new series slightly based on another of his trilogies, The Black Fleet Trilogy. This one starts after the Phage War we read about in that other series I mentioned. Some of the same characters are in this new series, and some with greatly expanded roles. I like it when authors carry over characters from one set of books to another. It sure saves time in character building if the characters were built correctly the first time.

In this series, Senior Captain Celesta Wright, the former XO for Senior Captain Jackson Wolfe, is now commanding the Icarus, a Star-wolf class destroyer. While Captain Wolfe actually saved the human civilization by defeating the Phage hive-mind, he also lost his ship, the TCS Ares and was subsequently honored, and then retired. He had enough of the Confederation politics trying to micromanage starships that were so far away it wasn’t possible to carry on a decent conversation. Some, including Chief of Staff Admiral Marcum wasn’t sad to see Wolfe gone. Now they were trying to do the same thing to Senior Captain Wright.

So, this book is about Senior Captain Wright and the Icarus. Something shows up in the same system as were the Phage War started and the Icarus is sent to investigate. What they find is almost impossible to believe. Unfortunately, they don’t get to marvel at their discovery for very long because the Darshik make their presence know in a very bad way. So now it appears that humanity just got out of one devastating war and are right back in another with an enemy they know very little about.

Then another previously unknown alien shows up, the Ushin, asking for protection from the Darshik. While the Darshik are definitely militaristic, the Ushin are just the opposite and seem to be strong pacifist. But, things are as they aways appear. Senior Captain Wright gets orders to go and assist the Ushin in driving out the Darshik from a previously held Ushin system. In turn, the Ushin are ready to identify almost two dozen human habitable planets they are willing to give up for this support. But, what do we really know about the Ushin or the Darshik for that matter. Can either be trusted?

A lot of good writing going on even though the space fighting seems to take a long time. It makes your wander why you can launch missiles at an enemy and they won’t reach the target for days! Why would a starship just stay on the same course if they knew missiles were streaking for them. I’m not sure about this kind of warfare, but that seems to be the way space wares are fought. It’s real boring until about 5 minutes before your destroyed!

I’ll be looking for the next two books. This series is very much worth reading.

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