The Sixth Line of Defense by Shiva Winters
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The Sixth Line of Defense by Shiva Winters
Shiva does it again.
Shiva Winters has a style a draws me right into the character right in the beginning. In this case she sounds like your average troubled teen who has to deal with a lot of intercity thugs at school. Only Shiva (this is also the name of the protagonist) has been bounced from school to school because she has a specific boiling point where she can no longer container herself in the face of adversity. She's proactive and she's tough and she doesn't back down and rarely loses the fight. She's been shifted from one bad school to another because of this.
Shiva is a special case as we soon find out both through her and through her handler Devon who has something in common with Shiva. Both are genetic soldier of a bygone era that were created to win the war and save the day. Except Shiva is from the 6th generation of these soldiers. Devon is from the 3rd gen and gens 4 and 5 were so horrible that the ones that didn't get put down are on ice. That means that everyone expects Shiva from gen 6 to be the worst.
That's pretty much the set-up for this story.
This book also contains a theme common to Shiva Winter's other writing. That theme is that there is a special bond between people that goes beyond friendship, sex, and even sometimes love. It knows no bounds when it happens and it's a profound experience and in some case as with the Salak'patan Series it can be deadly to both parties when on member of the bond dies.
This book also contains a heavy lesbian theme which is introduced fairly soon in the novel. Shiva and Vala meet at a special school (one that Devon has found for Shiva) and they bond and become very close in a short time, since that is the nature of the bond it makes the quick romance become somewhat believable.
Besides the bond itself we find that Vala has some special significance in the plot of the story.
Ultimately because of the failure to integrate the 4s and the 5s into society the military has been reluctant about the 6s and have only tried to integrate a handful of which all have failed except Shiva and as we mentioned Shiva has problems. Part of the plot is that someone wants them to have problems because they want to bury them deep. It eventually comes out that it's all part of a plot that hinges on eliminating the 6s who in part were created in-case the enemy was ever able to compromise the 4s and 5s and turn them against the military.
As the blurb mentions this story is about what it means to be human and that is definitely examined in a number of ways throughout the Narrative.
And that brings us to Shiva's style of writing. Her narrative is rich and sometimes her sentences are long and descriptive. And these are all things I enjoy about her writing. I will caution those who are severe about grammar spelling and general editing that this once again is not the book for you. Of those I took time to mark there are over 30 missing words or double words or things like than instead of then and in some cases ambiguous statements that sound wrong in context which might be more missing words or misspelled.
This is a good SFF for Young Adults and it contains some reasonable lesbian romance.
J.L. Dobias
View all my reviews
Ill-Timed Entanglements by Kassandra Lamb
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Ill-Timed Entanglements (The Kate Huntington Mystery Series #2 )by Kassandra Lamb
I loved this Kate Huntington mystery. I'm not even certain how I obtained this book. It might have been recommended from reading another mystery. I do like mysteries. I enjoyed Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle and many of Agatha Christie's and Rex Stout's Nero Wolf even Poe's Auguste Dupin. I also enjoy those popular television mysteries such as Columbo, Hart to Hart, Murder She Wrote, Munk, and even Psych. I recall many of these from a time when I'd sit with friends and we'd actively help solve the crime before the intrepid detectives.
It was hard to refrain from trying to solve the mystery so much that within the first 10 percent of the novel I was certain I had the answer. Betty Franklin is an elderly writer who is living in a retirement home and making a modest living off current best sellers when her agent, Sara Burnett calls with the exciting news that her latest book the publisher is picking up was so well received that they want two more and are offering a large advance. But then a woman in Betty's writers group, Doris Blackwell, accuses Betty of stealing her work and putting it into that latest novel and Betty has to call Sara and delay things until the legalities are all covered. Doris ends up murdered and Betty become s the prime suspect.
[spoiler]So I have this all figured out because Sara has a lot on the line here and we know how ruthless agents can be.[not really spoiler]
So that was too easy and Kassandra Lamb proceeds to show me how far off that might be. There are a thousand suspect, well more than a handful and then some.
I've not read the previous book but this book stands well alone and I think I got the gist of some of what happened in the first book, but if you are someone who can't stand having things spoiled and you haven't read the first book you probably should. As for me I'll be looking for the first book because I enjoyed these characters so much and would like to see how well they were 'drawn' in the previous book.
The mystery is the focus and there is more than one murder so plenty to go around with all the suspects. And we thought elderly communities were boring, bingo bazaars. Kate Huntington is a psychotherapist getting ready to return to work after maternity leave. -real spoiler- she is returning after being widowed and becoming a single mother to her daughter Eddie (named after her father).
As the story picks up Kate is enlisted by her friend Bob Franklin to travel to New York with his aunt Betty to iron out the wrinkle. Of course they never make it to New York because Betty is a suspect in a murder case. Within a short time the cast of detectives begin to assemble as the team begins to form with the purpose of quickly laying to rest any doubt of Betty's innocence. And the reader soon finds out that that is not happening soon and the body count is going to start going up.
This book contains some pop references and some are presented in a sort of tongue in cheek humorous fashion. They come close to cliche but mostly pop references. One in particular is to Perry Mason and this book does bring to mind the team of Perry Mason, Paul Drake, and Della Street. Only in this case Della (Kate) is going to have a large part in solving the case. With all these references I was almost not sure when one of the characters calls out "Oh Rob!" and if you don't understand that one then you are too young.
A few times a character makes up his own words and is called on the carpet for it.(Is this a writer-reader-writer group dig? I'm not sure.)
This book has a lot of characters, but they are not that difficult to keep track of.
I would be remiss if I failed to mention there are a few mistakes in the editing of the book nothing glaring just wrong words, I think. And for those who are sensitive to head hopping there were a few times I had to stop and think. In some instances it's limited to two characters ping ponging back and forth and Kassandra does do a lot of character thoughts . I have no problem with two characters and sometimes in romance it almost becomes appropriate but might work better if they were more well defined with pseudo scene breaks. There were times where a scene had the thoughts of at least three characters and those were the ones that might have given me pause. So yes beware of that. Most of the time it was quite smoothly done and had it been confined mostly between Skip and Kate I might not have even noticed. As it is Kassandra handles it quite well overall.
Good Mystery for those who like the who dun its and a healthy dose of romance to go along.
J.L. Dobias
View all my reviews
The Object: Book One by Winston Emerson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The Object: Book One (Object Series) by Winston Emerson
I really enjoyed this novel although I'm not that attached the the horror mayhem type of stories like this. This draws some similarities to H.G. Wells War of the Worlds, which again is a good novel just not my favorite. This novel takes place in Louisville instead of England and also has some similarities to the novel series The Beginning of the End by Michael Edward.
Winston Emerson creates some strong and believable characters and the writing is similar to that high literary style where the characters are drawn out well with all the flaws and foibles attached. We could have used a better balance of characters to offset the horror that was soon to ensue. There are several characters that stand out as potential for the reader to sympathize with, but a majority are pretty flawed and broken and though there might be opportunities to draw sympathy most of those characters become repulsive. There are a few of the gritty that redeem themselves, but in this type of fiction many of these characters die just as or just before you get to really know them.
There's a sense of plot somewhere in the background but because this has been published in the manner that it has been written within a blog-sphere the plot is mostly hanging rather loosely and this would be best read in its entirety, which at the moment is going to be difficult because not much more has been written and published yet.
I would give this five stars, but there are road-bumps that I couldn't get past. There are two characters that I would chose as the outstanding protagonists and they would be Lillia and Hayden. But those two characters take a dramatic turn in their life that may or may not have changed them entirely into unknown and unknowable characters. Because things are left pretty much hanging as in not explained and these are the two characters a reader might hang onto it becomes a sticky point among several sticky points.
The next sticky point is the mystery about the object. From front to back the reader doesn't get much of an advance in understanding to the tune that it's still not certain whether it has good or bad or indifference in its intent.
The next sticky point is the invasion of the body snatchers nature that the story is taking and the fact that it has the appearance that there is a contest or animosity between the snatched and it's difficult to tell if this is a side effect to the personality of the abducted body or if there are two different types of aliens or if in fact it's some sort of game or field exercise.
Once again as with this type of novel; the many well drawn characters are slowly being killed off as they meet together for some unknown purpose. It would almost seem at this point that most of the deaths are not directly perpetrated by the aliens unless we count in the panic and fear much the same as was caused by the Orson Wells radio broadcast. (Again many similarities here.)
This is a good story for the gritty characterizations and the portrayal of people caught in specific self destructive social structures within the big city. It has a good number of shock factors built into the narrative.
I think it would be best served whole though rather than piecemeal with the cliffhanger. Perhaps as the series plays out all of the mysteries that are brought before the reader will be answered eventually.
Of course the way that it is played out here might well be correct for the Genre it is trying to target.
J.L. Dobias
View all my reviews
The Emperor's Edge by Lindsay Buroker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The Emperor's Edge by Lindsay Buroker
I had this one in my kindle and of course one reason was that it is free. I decided that since I'd delved into steam-punk that I'd take a look see and decide if I should read it. The first thing I noticed was the humor- I'm going out on a limb here because humor is so subjective and at the risk of offending Lindsay Buroker I'm going to say I saw some definite humor in the text and subtext. I kept notes if anyone is interested in what I found so humorous. I kept getting this feeling that Lindsay may have spent a few hours somewhere in the past watching a lot of Rocky and Bullwinkle. This was not a bad thing-at least not for me.
So partway into the story I realized I hadn't done my usual thing, which is to look at the one and two star reviews. As usual many of those go on a bit about how they can't for the life of them fathom why there are so many 4 and 5 star reviews and how they felt cheated and wanted to warn people off. I love a challenge and so I jumped back into the fray and now I'm going to explain why I feel free to give this a 5 star rating.
It must be that like humor some forms of entertainment are also subjective.
Corporal Amaranthe Lokdon is and Enforcer for the Turgonian Empire, she's the only female enforcer so she has a lot to live up to and lot to of resistance to handle. She also has a slacker partner, Corporal Wholt, who has pretty much left her out in the cold having to explain his absence to her superiors. This is particularly distressing to her since her partner is up for a promotion that she clearly thinks she deserves.
When they reach the scene of the crime and she begins to hone her detective skills she is confronted with more disillusionment from her fellow officers when they decide she'd best be suited for cleanup detail. Admittedly though, Amaranthe is her own worst enemy in this respect because she seems to suffer an OCD compulsion to clean and straighten things. This is one of the most humorous aspects of her character and it makes one wonder is this OCD or just social training that keeps kicking in. She even finds she has to stifle the urge to clean in order to ensure she doesn't contaminate the scene of the crime by overt cleanliness.
While foiling a robbery Amaranthe meets the Emperor Sespian Savarsin who may have happened in just to observe her at work, however it is he seems to become enamored with her without her knowledge. It is in part this seeming chance meeting that begins the downward path of Amaranthe from Enforcer to fugitive. But not before she is given the assignment of her career, she's to assassinate the deadly assassin Sicarius and this could be the means to the promotion she's been looking for. The assignment comes from the Emperor's own Commander of the Armies Hollowcrest and during that interview Amaranthe once again falls into the sphere of the Emperor and has a few interesting revelations that will eventually help her better understand why her luck seems to travel south so quickly.
Amaranthe finds herself on the Enforcer's most wanted list and from there she embarks on life of crime with an unlikely array of allies. What's entirely entertaining about her cohorts is that each has their own social standing and quirks that make them only mildly suited for her plan and create an interesting and complex interaction. The Emperors life is in danger and the only people who know are a band of criminals under Amaranthe's direction and a conspiracy of criminals who want to see the Emperor assassinated, the Empire destroyed or at least a puppet empire set up.
Amaranthe's intel has unveiled the existence of some criminals who seem to have an agenda that is economically motivated so her plot is to threaten to disrupt the economy so that she can draw these criminals out into the open to reveal them in time to save the Emperor.
This is really a well crafted story that only errs in that humor is subjective and to some people may run flat or even go above and beyond them and distract from the story. Even so, cutting through all that the astute reader should have no problem seeing the development of the plot and enjoy the development of the characters. This is part of a series of books but has a satisfactory ending that makes it complete within itself.
Now I could be facetious and say this book was so good that I can't understand why it has any bad reviews, but really each to his own. It's often a matter of perception and whether someone dismisses the book for perceived problems and scans through the rest or simply doesn't finish it. I've always said if someone says something won't work or isn't any good they should never be put in charge of any phase of it because they will be out to make sure it doesn't succeed.
That much said: I'll offer my usual warning that this book does contain some errors, not nearly as many as I've seen in others but they are there. Sometimes its words missing spaces between them other times words are missing. Does it look like the author was spelunking into the thesaurus to find words, maybe, but maybe she was just following those ridiculous online 'writers' groups that insist that you should never use the same word twice within a certain distance to each other. Or possibly, since I never found any word that didn't mean what it said within the context, just possibly she chose to use those words with a purpose. Lindsay Buroker does seem to have a slight different style to her writing that shows up enough to stand out sometimes, but it is a good and refreshing style that is refreshing because it's different from the usual cookie cutter writing coming out of some of these online 'writer' forums. Could she use some more editing, couldn't we all, but I didn't find anything that distracted me from enjoying the story or following the well written plot-line. Would I read more?
Yes.
This is a good story for SFF fans, Mostly fantasy and not for the people who need a lot of solid science. It does qualify for steam-punk as there are enough elements of steam driven technology evident although it is not the main driving force of the story and I'm not so sure about Victorian dress. It has elements of magic, but it is not the only steam-punk I've read that uses elements of magic. It's a good Young Adult Adventure story and even has an element of mystery with well defined characters to drive the story.
Thanks Lindsay for a good entertaining read.
J.L. Dobias
View all my reviews
![The Sixth Discipline (Haven #1)]()
The Sixth Discipline by Carmen Webster Buxton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The Sixth Discipline (Haven) by Carmen Webster Buxton
I really liked this story and found myself immersed from the first page and onward.
The Sixth Discipline is yet one more of those kidnapped novels that seem so popular out there. What makes this one different for me was the way it grabbed my interest from the start and kept it. It was not the intense action and a massive seat of the pants type of hook that every other author seems to think the reader needs. It was more a subtle gentle drawing into the mystery that surrounds the story. It kept me reading it almost straight through.(I did have to stop to sleep and then go to work.)
The story starts with Ran-Del a simple hunter of the Sansoussy people of the Falling Water Clan. Only we quickly find that there is nothing simple about the Sansoussy people. Right away we are acquainted with the Disciplines as Ran-Del uses them to calm himself after being shot with some sort of paralyzing agent. The people who capture him are from the city and seem to know a lot about his people. Once they realize their massive dose has failed to render him unconscious (via the disciplines) they give him something more to make him collapse into darkness.
I found that even though the excitement in most of the scenes seemed a bit muted when compared with many action yarns, Carmen Webster Buxton knows how to tell a good story well; blending mystery and intrigue and romance. Ran-Del's character is interesting and I quite agree with his attitude toward being kidnapped. And though his primary kidnapper seems to have a good self justifiable reason for this crime Baron Stefan Haydon could seriously work on his methods. It could almost be comical when his daughter, Francesca seems to alternately go along almost complacently sometimes and other times is on the verge of rebellion against her father's strange plan. Either way kidnapping is kidnapping and that's really no way to find your daughter a good mate or to make friends.
Partly by plan and part by accident or perhaps part by way of the Psy/Precog nature of the Falling Water Clan Stefan's plans go just a bit south when the tables get turned. His daughter gets a chance to experience this whole thing from the other side and the reader gets to find that the Falling Water Clan is almost as bat crazy as Francesca's father in the form of Ran-Del's Great grandfather a shaman who is a seer who has a vision about Ran-del and Francesca.
Stefan Hayden wants to preserve his family line and fortune and ensure his daughter's safety in a city that is full of rich families that truck in plots and intrigue and his worries will prove to be well founded. His solution is to bring in an outsider (Ran-Del) who has special empathic abilities that will help his daughter survive especially if something happens to Stefan.
Ran-Del's clan is all about family and continuing the family line. But the shaman (his great grandfather) seems to have that handled even if he must give up his family's youngest male in the line, Ran-Del.
So the question becomes can larceny and destiny lead to true love? There is certainly a lot to love about these two potential lovers.
There's a whole lot of interesting world-building as we learn both about the city people and the Sansoussy people along with the estranged couple as they each try to cope within the others world. At some point midst the alternating kidnappings the reluctant couple find themselves being thrust into a sort of arranged deranged engagement.
Carmen Webster Buxton has a style of writing that is easy flowing and if there are any sentence structure problems they somehow got past me as I whipped through the pages. I did find a few problems of missing words, but over all I'd say less than a handful of nitpicks, although for those sensitive to those issues you may see a few.
This is good SFF Young Adult Romance Adventure and though usually the kidnap/love stories make me cringe because of the improbability of seriously falling in love with your kidnapper, this one at least balances the tables on the players and manages to deliver some good character interaction.
J.L. Dobias
View all my reviews
![Astra: Synchronicity]()
Astra: Synchronicity by Lisa Eskra
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Astra: Synchronicity By Lisa Eskra
I enjoyed reading this one. It's a bit of a light in most ways though Lisa Eskra took on an ambitious task and approached it from a slightly different angle than I've seen in the past. For a first effort I think she did fairly well, but the most important part is that it gained my interest and kept it throughout the book. There was a slight shock factor when getting to the end and realizing it's the end and wanting to have more story. But this is a trilogy and there will be more. This; at the very least and best is not like those serialized snippets I've too often seen here.(The ones that are 16 to 30 some pages and barely have time to introduce the characters.) This is a full fledged 200 some page book that to my estimation qualifies as a novel and even though some points are left unresolved the reader is left at a place that is in no way less than where some of the John Carter of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs novels often left the reader.
Synchronicity takes on the question of psions in a world that hates people with psychic abilities. This is reminiscent of the book Slan by A.E. VanVogt. But Lisa Eskra takes her own slant on the issue.
In the Astra universe Earth has been ruined and is no longer habitable the process that caused this has possibly created a whole new branch in the tree of mankind that have psionic abilities. In a sort of dystopic way, but in this treatment it takes a back seat to the story, the Psion's have to renew their energy by sucking the life out of normals(Mind Rape, which is fatal).(Although they can also suck the life out of each other if it comes to that.) What they suck is the Gamma-mine, a neurotransmitter that regulates the psionic potential. Mankind has left earth and colonized other worlds and have split into three main factions the PAU, AF and UE. None of the faction have any affection for the psions and they each have their different degree of tolerance towards them. In most cases they try in some way to regulate them when they are not trying to kill them.
Magnius Zoleki one of the main protagonists is a psion who has been hiding his abilities. He's even successfully hidden them from his present wife, Lyneea. That wife hates psions because they murdered her parents so it's understandable that when she discovers the secret she files for divorce. This whole scenerio puts Magnius in danger because his secret is likely to come out to the whole of Astra. Magnius has many more secrets including that hes running from the Psion's; in specific the leader Aliane and her consort Zingeri who send an assassin named Tiyuri to capture Magnius.
Amii Martin has amnesia, with a condition described by one character as a fugue state though it might be a specific type with selective amnesia because she has not created a whole new identity and she has clear memories that allow her to function on a high level with many complex tasks. She finds out she is the alleged daughter and assistant of Dr. Xander Adams who is attempting to create a functional android or robot. The Dr. is on the run and being pursued because he has stolen valuable equipment to continue his work. Dr. Xander claims that Amii Martin was struck on the head which is not a consistent factor with fugues so we'll have to wait and see how that works out.
Through some quirk Magnius and Amii are brought together along with the crews of two ships, the Kearsarg and the Schenectady(captained by Lyneea's sister Ardi.) And they are introduced to Nadine Taylor who is a well know psion married to a politician of the AF.
If that's not enough, there has been a first contact situation involving Schenectady and the aliens known as Xurianian's.
Honestly speaking with so much going on; 260 pages was really not enough to do total justice to the story.
This results in a slight disjointedness as we seem to fast-forward through and past some important elements such as the actual point of contact in the first contact. So if I had any nitpicks it would be that there needed to be about a hundred more pages of narrative.
Lastly I can't go without mentioning the grammar errors. Because I try not to include them in the star score I try to be sure to mention them for the picky reader. There are a larger number than normal (for some people zero is normal but for my taste I can abide a handful.) Probably the only one that sticks out in my mind is the recurrence of the word lied where lay belongs, which is almost understandable since lay normally takes an object such as 'lay the book down' and lie does not have the object such as 'I lie down' and the problem comes when the past form of lie is lay and not lied. Anything else in the grammar and sentence structure that created problems were mostly transparent where the lied just stuck out like fingernail on chalkboard.
I think this is a good light read for people who like SFF for young adults with less emphasis on the Science part of the science fiction. There were enough interesting mysteries in this one to make me interested in following up with the rest of the series to see how those resolve.
J.L. Dobias
View all my reviews
A Desert Called Peace by Tom Kratman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A Desert Called Peace by Tom Kratman. (Cerrera)
I've let this one sit in my kindle for quite a while before I finally decided to read it. Obviously one reason for downloading it was that it's free. It's also long. I enjoyed it and there are a few friends I have to whom I would recommend it because they love these kinds of novels. This is science fiction mostly because it takes place on another planet known as Terra Nova. The bulk of the story could well have taken place on Earth in some strange dystopia or parallel universe.
A Desert Called Peace (ADCP) is similar to Robert Heinlein's Starships Troopers (ST) minus the bug war. Some people might take that poorly, those who don't like ST, I mean it as a sort of complement but mostly just a simple comparison and my own reaction to what ADCP reminded me of. The book is like a recruitment poster and or propaganda campaign much as ST was. I will admit as far as readability ADCP seemed better. But for myself there were large portions of the narrative I could have done without to the tune that I had to watch myself every time I was tempted to scan past those places where the author described the weaponry and munitions and the alternatives and viability of each specific tool of warfare. As I mentioned I have some friends who really eat that stuff up, not so much myself.
The author has the credentials and seems to know his stuff and wants to let the reader know. Once again I'm not a fan of five hundred pages of deadly boot-camp to be followed by 50 pages of real combat. The thing is that the book, although heavy in the description of the armament and gear and the trials and tribulations of training, is about how the main character starting out in a simple life of retirement from service and building to become almost a mirror of his enemies. This aspect reminded me of some of the suspense thrillers (Shibumi by Trevanian) I've read where the secret agent or mercenary is trying to retire and gets thrust back into the game by someone attacking his loved ones.(The single weakness they have.) This story is no different in that respect, because Cerrera,Patrico Hennessey de Cerrera known as Patrick Hennessey and later as the Blue Jinn, loses his wife to the actions of some terrorist whose act almost parallels the twin towers destruction.
(There also is a sub plot in inter-rum chapters that runs parallel describing a past Cerrera who also was drawn into war despite himself)
Cerrera grieves a short time and then decides on revenging his family. One irony built into this story is that to become like his enemy and better understand his enemy he has to understand that the enemy is motivated highly by family, protecting the family and revenging the family. For some reason he doesn't understand that for a long time and he fails to see it even when many of his new found allies have the same value system. Basically he is blind to the fact that right from the start he has had a jump-start at becoming like his enemy. Needless it is this revenge that fuels him that makes him more dangerous than he would be normally. Cerrera is dangerous in his own right because he is a student of war. At the time of the atrocity he is collecting data from former enemies about the final battle, in which he'd conquered them while he was working for the FSC.
Now he will use those contacts to create a school for his army of revenge.
This is where we have a slight questionable wrinkle in the continuum. The story is confusing with a lot of jumping back and forth between timelines because we do need some history and world building to take place. Roughly we're about 450 years in the future and women are still treated mostly the same as they are today and are not allowed into combat. This is the world as Tom Kratman builds it so it stands as is and it's just curious to me that they might have even gone backwards by that point in time. Although to be fair the people who colonized the planet contained enough elements to support that possibility.
At some point along the way the story seems to do an insidious turn on the reader. Perhaps it's amid all the gleaming armor and new toys that are so eloquently placed as distractions. Up to that point Patrico Cerrera is the protagonist we sympathize with, who has just cause to seek his revenge. But he begins to cross the hazy line that pushes back any sympathy or empathy and the remainder of the book seems to have few if any redeeming characters for the reader to latch onto and even those few are minor characters at best.
Perhaps this is planned to show a part of the horror of war or perhaps the Desert Called Peace(ADCP) is more similar to The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslev Hasek(TGSS) than anything else. TGSS is a dark comedy about the first world war. The only real difference between these two is that in TGSS everyone was incompetent whereas in ADCP Cerrera's forces at the least are portrayed as competent. It would seem in ADCP the incompetent might have been removed by attrition where in TGSS it appeared the competent are the ones eliminated by attrition. Also Cerrera's philosophy seemed unique to this book in that he expected every man of any rank to come back from maneuvers with dirty hands and sweaty brow or they'd answer to him .
When we reach the point of real battle the reader is introduced to the law of war concept. Basically the civil code that combatants should follow during war. This is introduced for a dual effect of giving the protagonist back and edge of humanity in trying to abide by these rules and showing how the enemy abuses them and uses them to their advantage. It also shows the supposed cunning intellect of Cerrera as he stays within the law most of the time and continues to hold control of the situation. The LoW that we see are a somewhat abbreviated edition if my feeble attempts to research were entirely fruitful. I'm sure that the author has a much better grasp of the entirety of the law to justify the brevity he has handed the reader. Trying to keep up with it can be quite complex and probably does lend to some bit of variety in interpretation.
I'm not all that certain how torturing prisoners while interrogating them actually falls in all of the laws of war. I take it from the context of the book that it must be frowned upon. The torture is only one of several different elements that show up in the book that might cause some readers to leave their comfort zone. There are atrocities preformed against women and children most often designed to make the bad guys look worse. There is at least one questionable spot, where someone is killing women who have been allowing themselves to be used by the bad guys to be kidnapped to obtain ransom, that might implicate the good guys in murder as a reprisal. But by that time the good guys and the bad guys just aren't that far away from each other.
This is a book I could easily love/hate with so many elements I don't agree with. But with good writing it is often the emotional response that tells me if the piece is good. I don't have to agree with it or like the characters or even feel comfortable with the plot for it to be well written. If it evokes a strong emotion, even if it might not be the emotion that the author expects, it can still stand as a good work.
This is a good book for people who like War stories with lots of descriptive elements about the styles of weapons and combat. Even those enthusiastic about war strategy might find this of interest. The Science Fiction is incidental.
J.L. Dobias
View all my reviews
