This was not even worth the huge “daily deal” discount. From the summary, I was hoping for Peter Quill meets Robotech, or Firefly meets Iron (alien) Man. But, this was just dull tech talk and battle sequences. The book is six hours (there’s a one hour preview for book 2 at the end that I had no desire to listen to).
The first half was the most promising. Dash is a courier with a spaceship, a hangover, and cash flow problem. He’s a less dimensional Han Solo, right down to the early rescue gig, where a woman/ship in need mentions a cargo worth “more than you can imagine” and he utters the Solo line of “I can imagine a lot.” Before you know it, Dash takes on three crew with little backstory and limited purpose: Leira (fellow courier and I’m guessing love interest in the future books), Victor (crusty Sgt-type figure), and Conniver (tech/science know it all). The three exist mostly to explain the story in huge info dumps. Even though they’ve just met, they are immediately a like minded team who venture into The Pasture, aka The Maelstrom, a forbidden space zone filled with alien tech and guarded by Clan Sheerna.
The second half is pretty much three hours of the Dash Show, where he dons a robot suit, marvels at how advanced the suit is, and becomes an unbeatable warrior. Snore. No tension, predictable victory, and nothing but faceless redshirt alien death.
Narrator Kafer reads every book like an action movie. His gravelly voice is usually good for military-style action books, but here he just had nothing to work with. Without any real character development, I got so bored that I got on Audible and looked at the rest of this series. The author churns out cookie cutter books every few months. One reviewer says there’s already a plan through book ten, which is a dead give away for lower quality, money grab stories. I wish I’d have noticed that sooner. At least I got this book super cheap and didn’t even waste a credit on it.
No matter what kind of military sci-fi you like, I would recommend almost anything over this series:
* Fleet Ops (1 ⭐️ for me, but mostly for the multiverse / time travel tropes)
* The Dauntless (2 ⭐️ for lovers of space battle tactics and the Battle Star Galactica reboot)
* Expeditionary Force (2 ⭐️ humans vs. space hamsters & lizards series)
* Forsaken Mercenaries (3 ⭐️ Bourne space amnesiac heads into apocalyptic Mad Max style earth)
* Galaxies Edge (3-5 ⭐️, mixed bag ‘Merica style military sci-fi to Star Wars bounty hunter fantasy)
* The Queens Road (3 ⭐️ more fantasy than military action, as a human falls MIB style onto a space highway patrolled by space rangers)
* We Are Legion (4-5 stars, funny, philosophical epic involving sentient space ships loving pop culture)
* Hell Divers (4-5 stars following remnants of humanity as they struggle to survive in airships above nuclear ravaged Earth)