A new author for me and a new series just beginning. This is a very good book. It’s my kind of book in that there is a lot of action and fighting. Unfortunately, the lead character is female. Now before everyone accuses me of being a male chauvinist pig, you should realize that I am one, so your accusations don’t matter! I don’t like female heroes. Readers, or at least this one, like to put themselves into the story and assume the role of a character. I’m always thinking, “Now, what would I have done?”, but with a female lead, I, personally can’t do that. But, I do have to say, this female lead is one hell of a fighter. She goes by the name Abigail Cage, a.k.a, Abbey. She’s military and a special forces operative with training gained through HSOC, which I think stands for Headquarters, Special Operations Command, although it’s never spelled out in the book. She has a background in computer sciences and linguistics which means she’s trained to be a “Breaker”. That, I believe is similar to what we would call a hacker. She’s very good at what she does and has been doing it for almost six years. Abbey is about to end her military career after this one last mission. She’s going home to her daughter and live a “normal” life for a change. Well, she would have if she hadn’t been framed for treason!
This book introduces a lot of characters. Some don’t stay around for very long. I did mention there is a lot of fighting and, well, people usually get killed when that happens. We do get to meet on other character that main to the story and he’s Captain Olus Mann, Chief of the OSI for the Republic. He’s a very dangerous man although he hasn’t done actual field work for some time. It seems that he’ll be needing to get back into the field if he wants to find out what happened to the two brand new starships that were just captured and taken by the Outworlders. They some how managed to do this right under the noses of most of the ranking Republic leadership, but that leadership, for the most part, won’t be around to worry about the theft since they were all on the space station and it was totally destroyed. As I mentioned, there are lots of dead people in this book.
We do get to meet a lot of alien characters. That makes the book that much more interesting, although I hate it when authors start creating alien names. Most I can’t even pronounce and those are the names supposedly in English. You’ll find a fair number of those aliens around, but fortunately, the ones we encounter the most have pretty short and pronounceable names. Then there’s the Outworlders. Something has shown up that doesn’t make sense. The Outworlders beyond the Fringe of known space haven’t been overly aggressive until lately. Now they have stolen two of the Republic’s newest starships and they appear to be heading for war. But, no one on the Republic’s side knows who is leading this rabble. The Outworlders don’t have their own military; each independent planet has it’s own military structure and to date, no one has bothered trying to combine them into a cohesive fighting force for the Outworlders. Still, there is something out there and Captain Mann has to find out what it is. But, he needs a special kind of operative with a team that can get the job done. He would go to Hell if that’s what necessary to get this kind of team together and that’s exactly what he does.
The second book is out, “Fire and Brimstone”, and, of course, I already have it. This is going to be a very good series if I can get past the fact that our hero is a girl!!!!!