This is a really well written science fiction book. I was kind of skeptical about all the previous characters who were military, now becoming private citizens, yet still being involved in some highly military-type activities. But, Andria Stone has managed to pull it off very well.
Dr. Mark Warren has formed a private corporation called MAVREK Enterprises. They are working with the TMD as consultants and specifically still following leads from the Beth Coulter incident. The know of two twins who seem to be trying to carry out Coulter’s insane scheme of taking over Mars so they can build a clone and cyborg army of their own. Mark gets directly involved in this when he’s targeted for death, but they wind up killing the wrong man. Mark showed up late to a bakery while a Mars Police investigator who just happened to look like Mark was killed and lay dead in the bakery.
So now, Mark and his team are going after two twins known as Victor and Valerie Parker. While Victor proves to be the dumber of the two and gets captured pretty quickly, Valerie is just the opposite. She’s very intelligent and also very blood thirsty. She’s behind a lot of activities on Mars and leaving a lot of dead bodies in her wake. Unfortunately, Colonel Maeve Sorayne of the TMD, turns out to be one of those bodies. In the previous book, while Sergeant Axel Von Radch and Colonel Sorayne were both on active duty, they were prohibited by regulation from having any kind of involvement other than professional. Now that Axel was a civilian and out of the TMD, he found that Colonel Sorayne and he were very much sole mates and meant for each other. They were living a life of bliss and immensely enjoying each others company. That is until she was murdered!
Needless to say Axel is now on the warpath. He’s so filled with anger that both Mark and Kamryn are worried that he might do something that he’ll regret in the long run and it won’t help in their capture of the actual guilty party. They have to keep a close watch on him, try to keep him focused along with the rest of the team and make sure he doesn’t go rogue on them. That’s going to be a tough job which only partially succeeds.
So, now the team is after the Parker twins. Little by little they learn more about the twins and their operations on Mars. Yes, this action takes place on Mars which is completely outside the jurisdiction of the Terran Military Department (TMD). With the number of cyborgs that they thing the Parkers have on Mars, it’s going to take some serious firepower to control the situation and find out what the Parker twins are up to. They do know that she seems to be paying off her criminal partners in cloned girls who can be used for whatever purpose the client chooses. This doesn’t turn out to be a pretty story.
Still, the book is well written and keeps you in suspense. When it seems that things are about to end, something alwasy comes up and they are off on another lead. The entirety of Mars is depending on the Mavrek Team stopping the Parkers and especially, Valerie.
Obviously, since this is a trilogy, there has to be a third book. I’ll be reading it for sure!