Kill Team + Attack of Shadow

Galaxy’s Edge, Book 3 + 4


  • Author: Jason Anspach and Nick Cole

  • Narrator: R.C. Bray

  • Score: 4.5

  • Books like this: Expeditionary Force, In Fury Born, Mavericks

  • Length: 15hrs 24min

  • Published: 05/06/2018

Personal Score: 4.5 star

Professional Score: 4.5 star

TLDR: A special forces adventure and a single massive battle. You’ll need to be keen on military sci-fi to get along with these books, but seeing as that’s exactly what I go for, they were brilliant.

I’m starting to get the impression that each book in this series is going to be written completely differently to those that came before it, with a single narrative thread binding them altogether. Don’t get me wrong, the technique works, and works brilliantly. It’s just not a technique that I’ve seen used often before, but novelty usually scores very highly with me.

So, Book 3 takes place immediately following the events of Book 1, and we finally get a little more info on what happened to Victory Company, or at least to its few surviving legionaries. These sections of the book are primarily first-person perspectives, just as Book 1 was, but the book also follows the exploits of a deep cover operative who is entangled in the current mess, written from a second-person perspective. This use of second-person perspective is pretty rare for the genre, and I honestly can’t think of another book that I’ve reviewed that uses it to this degree. What I will say is that it was exactly the right call to make for that character’s sections, seeing as we are being narrated to as if the speaker is the true identity of the agent and we are his alter ego. The technique is a brilliant tool for exploring the mental gymnastics and bone-deep dichotomy between the agent and the personality he must don, and it worked perfectly. Amazing writing. The novel itself, as with the last pair of books, has great pacing but with a lesser degree of action-packed content than Book 1, taking a lot of psychological twists and once again fleshing out the Galaxy’s Edge universe a great deal. It was entertaining and engaging, and if you enjoyed Book 1, you will absolutely enjoy Book 3.

Now to Book 4. This novel consists entirely of the opening push by The Man in Black immediately following the events of Book 2, that being a full-scale surprise assault on a major Republic world, along with its truly awe-inspiring orbital defences and very coveted shipyards. This book consists entirely of this single battle and the various strings that The Man in Black has tied about the galaxy to ensure his first move from amongst the shadows is as devastating as it is unexpected. Let’s be clear. This book is basically one big battle with a sprinkling of politicians running around in the background. If you don’t think a book consisting exclusively of a massive-scale battle is your cup of tea, then you probably won’t like this book. I, however, inhale that kind of content like a crack addict with a twelve-hour itch. To me personally, this book was brilliant, giving my military nerd side a vast amount of explanation on how the armies and navies of this universe work all within a non-stop carnage-fest of warriors clashing at an epic scale. It was brilliant, but I do have a couple of nit-picking issues. First, I’ve been spoilt by hard sci-fi, and specifically the super realistic visions of how combat between star ships would logically need to happen given the vast distances and unimaginable speeds that spacecraft would have to adhere to if they were real. Now, although the ground combat elements of this book series are fairly grounded in fact, the space combat is not. That’s not a terrible thing, and it allows for far more awesome scenes to occur, but considering the amount of time and effort that Anspach and Cole have put into building a realistic and believable military force that is used in believable and realistic ways, the book does sometimes drop the ball by having aspects of space combat that look good but make absolutely no logical sense (basically like all the space combat from Star Wars). The book (and series in general) does have a number of these space combat tropes that conform to illogical but traditional ideas of sci-fi that work to undermine what is otherwise an extremely well thought-out universe. But as I said, I’m nit-picking for negatives because I otherwise loved this book.

In short, this pair of books doesn’t quite meet the outstanding standard left by the last pair, but it was still an extremely enjoyable, deep, and thoroughly entertaining listen. A great pair of novels.

As for narration, R.C. Bray is at it again with wonderful voicing of not just male and female characters but also those of other species. A great performance. 

 

Personal Score: 4.5 stars

Professional Score: 4.5 stars

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