I was just thrilled to find that Mr. Larson was still writing this series. I hadn’t seen a new book for quite sometime and I really missed the series. And to my great pleasure, I not only found this 10th book, but he’s already published the 11th, “Armored World” which I immediately purchased and will enjoy very soon. If this is your first time to see a book in this series, I highly encourage you to go back to the beginning and start from there.
Now, about this book. Well, James McGill is back and that’s great. Legion Varus is in-between mission which means they’re standing down on Earth with most of the Legion members enjoying some well deserved rest and relaxation. James just happens to be in his shack in Georgia with none other than Galina Turov, his Tribune! This isn’t that unusual except it is unusual for his parents to drop in while he is entertaining a female guest. His parents invited James and his guest to go to breakfast with them, which on a Sunday, wasn’t all that unusual, well, except for his guest being Galina Turov.
His parents were actually fishing for information about Etta, James’ daughter and their Granddaughter. They hadn’t seen her for awhile and were wondering where she had gone. James didn’t really want to talk about that subject since he had this strange relationship with his daughter. Etta just about did whatever she wanted and as a young woman, she did things James wasn’t so sure she should be doing. But, she was her fathers daughter so what should he have expected. Anyway, he had told his parents that Etta went back to Dust World to visit her sickly grandfather. All the while, James had sent Etta back to Dust World to protect her. James didn’t like the fact that his old nemesis, Claver, was hanging around and mentioning his daughter too much. James felt that it wasn’t beyond Claver to use Etta to get James to do something he didn’t want to do, so he sent her away. Only thing is, Galina spilled the beans by telling his parents that things weren’t all that safe around Earth for Etta and that’s why he sent her away. Obviously, his parents wanted to know more about this threat to their granddaughter.
Well, it turns out that Claver was after Etta. And he showed up at James’ shack just after Galina left to go back to HQ. He was, in fact, looking for Etta and not necessarily in a good way. It seems that Etta had stolen a valuable book from James and sold it to Claver for enough money to get herself out to Dust World. The only problem with this, other than she was dealing with Claver in the first place, was that Etta had sold Claver a bogus copy of the book. Now he wanted his money back, but he had to find out where Etta went. That brought him to the one place he new where he could find James when Legion Varus wasn’t active.
Of course, when James found out that Claver was looking for Etta, he did what any normal father would do, he killed him! Yeap, he took Claver out to the old barn in the swamp where he had hidden the book and then he just killed Claver. Well, actually this was only a copy of Claver so it didn’t really mean much, but it would delay the real Claver’s attempt to find Etta. And he needed to find her first to find out how she had gotten tangled up with Claver. So he’s off to Dust World.
And that happens in the first couple of chapters. This story has so many twist and turns it should be hard to follow them, but our author does such and excellent job of writing that you’ll enjoy every single moment of James getting into and then out of trouble. And that he does in abundance. There is still a lot of Legion fighting so his time off doesn’t last long. His travels during this book take him all the way to the galactic center where few if any humans have ever been. He gets killed a number of times, but as usual, he gets revived one way or another. That’s what kind of makes these books special. Dying isn’t the end of the story, not when you can be spit out of a retrieval machine and go right back into the fight.
As I mentioned, there is still another book in this series and I’m sure I’ll enjoy “Armor World” as well as I have enjoyed all of these Undying Mercenaries books so far.