Blurb/Description: 

Lieutenant Callum Harper hadn’t intended on punching his commanding officer quite so hard. But maybe it wasn’t such a bad turn of events. Court-martialed and dumped on a reject raft bound for Earth, Cal feels optimistic about a life where getting blown up, shot, or even eaten is altogether less of a concern. And, more importantly, a life where the only person he’s responsible for is himself.

Unfortunately, fate doesn’t favour the mundane. Crash-landing on a lethal planet, and with technology failing all around him, Cal must take his fellow passengers under his wing in order to survive and unravel the reasons behind their situation.

But the cause is far worse than any of them could have imagined, for theirs is a small part of a much larger crisis. Colonized space is under attack. Humanity is on the verge of chaos. And those who enjoy such anarchy are already beginning to thrive.

Yet Cal and his new companions will discover that mankind isn’t the true threat”, not by a long shot.

Review 3 of 5 Stars

I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review before it launched and before it had a cover. NOTE: Please keep in mind that since I’m reviewing such an early copy some of the issues mentioned may have been fixed over time. This is one of the books that dropped through the cracks. Right off the bat the book lost a star for wrong word usage, spelling and grammatical errors.

The first half of this book was incredibly slow despite some action and I had a hard time getting interested in the characters. In fact, for a time, I thought about just putting it down. However, I hate to leave a book unfinished and am glad I didn’t give in to the urge. I think the real problem was just the setup for a series and getting everyone together. By the time I got to the end of the book I had become more invested in both the characters and the story. The book isn’t too heavy on the science portion so if that’s where you find your pleasure you might want to look elsewhere. If you enjoy an action romp this book picks up on that score as the story advances.

Cal, Jumper, Eddy, Toker, Melinda and Viktor are a strange group thrown together by happenstance in the story. The first part of the book seemed a lot like Jurassic Park on Mars and I really wasn’t into that part. Toward the midpoint of the book there was more going on and the team, as well as the story, seemed to coalesce a little more. As far as the action goes, as things heated up the action did move the story along.

Plenty of people have reviewed this book at 4 and 5 stars, but it just didn’t rank that high for me. I enjoyed parts of the story very much and had hoped that those portions would be fleshed out more. Perhaps in Book #2 that will happen. Maybe I’m just impatient. Everyone also seemed to miraculously live through some pretty rough stuff even if they were kind of banged up. Given the scale of the battle in the story it seems unlikely that the whole group would have survived and at some points the ensemble characters seemed a little too lucky for my liking.

In the end if you’re just looking for an action adventure story with a little mystery thrown in to wonder about then this may be your book. If you’re looking for something you can sink your mental teeth into, so to speak, you might want to look for another book. To me it seemed like several science fiction standards had been strung into one book, but the writing wasn’t bad aside from the errors I noted at the beginning. I liked it, but I didn’t love it. It’s a fine book for the beach in my opinion. As always this is just my opinion. If you want to know for sure if you’ll like the book, then you should read it. Until next time, happy reading.