This wasn’t the book I was expecting but it was still pretty darn good. Set in 2155 in Colorado, the US is no more. Rather, the country has been divvied up among several large corporations. If you aren’t a corp, then you’re on the outside. Maybe you work in secret some place or perhaps you are with whatever military organization Aidan and his ragtag crew are part of. (It’s the Defense State Force but I have to look at the book description to figure that out as it’s not really mentioned or described well in the story).

So there’s these outposts and one particular outpost holds personnel that have issues with authority. The Wild Cards were once a cohesive unit that got stuff done but since loosing Taylor, their commanding officer, they have been a source of trouble to middle management. Now Aidan has been assigned there as his first command.

These outposts are in place to do several things – gather info, help move people quietly across Corporate borders, and steal all sorts of supplies from the corporations. There lots of drones and self-driving vehicles, wicked coding, and fun tech to keep our heroes under the radar. I see that this book has been labeled cyberpunk but there’s not really any of that going on. No VR at all.

This tale has a great mix of character growth, action, and near-future tech. I really liked Aidan and Kevin McIllian. Tho it was sometimes a little unbelievable that everyone but Kevin had small vocabularies. Sometimes Kevin would use words that have fallen out of common use in this 2155 corporation run USA (like sovereignty and lexicon). Other times, I found it unbelievable that his team mates wouldn’t know certain words (like retention). Still, Kevin is a fun character and I did love the way he talked and geeked out about old classic movies (liked Shrek).

Everyone at this outpost seems to have a secret, which made the team building even more interesting. Aidan is trans (which we know from the beginning). Kevin is hiding his heritage. Aidan has his hands full trying to win over these Wild Cards. I really enjoyed the give and take, the mistakes made on all sides and the efforts to recover from those mistakes. I’m not one for romance, but I couldn’t help but cheer for Aidan and Kevin as they bumbled through their courtship. The sex scenes were nicely done being tasteful and caring.

Later in the story, we do learn a bit more about the corporations and what happened to the USA. In walks Billy and Tweak who provide reasons for the plot to explore this aspect a bit. Tweak was both endearing and frustrating. I totally felt why Aidan wanted to strangle this brilliant, scarred brat. It was brilliant how Aidan and Kevin eventually win her over, bit by bit. And I thought Aidan had a hard time wining over Lazarus earlier in the book!

Some of the scifi aspects were well done – like the drones. But I had questions about other things – like why isn’t there a better way for Aidan to get his testosterone? We have 5 year slow release hormone birth control implants for women now. So why not something similar for testosterone in 2155? There were other areas where I thought the story would have benefited from some near-future scifi tech.

All together, it was a gripping story even with all the unanswered questions about the background (how did we get to this point & exactly what is this military group?). The character growth was the best part of the story. I would place this book in near-future scifi, military, LGBTQ+ genres. 4/5 stars.

The Narration: Kirt Graves gave a great performance on the narration for this story. In fact, I was listening when my husband came to bed and after a minute or two, he asked if the audiobook was multicast. He was surprised when I told him it was all just one guy. He was impressed with Graves’s female character voices, as was I. He had unique voices for all the characters and regional accents, including a Hispanic accent for one border crossing character. His stutter for Tweak was also well done. The pacing was perfect & there were technical issues with this recording. 5/5 stars.

I received this audiobook in exchange for an honest review. The gifting of this audiobook did not affect my opinion of it.