PG's Books

Part 1 of Storm on The Frontier was an excellent read so I naturally I had high hopes for this one and I was not disappointed. As can be expected of a book called “Part 2” it follows Part 1 fairly seamlessly. I got the feeling that this book have a slightly faster pace than part 1. This is probably because the majority of the world building was done in part 1 and we spend more time with the actual story in this book. It is a large book compared to a lot of the science fiction novellas out there and with this book it is not a bad thing.

Much of the story revolves around Baran Igashu, his team and their efforts to figure out what is going on and bring home proof to the slow witted politicians. I do not think that I spoil things too much when I say that the Alliance finally understand that they are being attacked and the dumbass politicians finally get their behinds, literally, kicked into gear.

The character of Baran Igashu is as fun to read about as in the first book although perhaps some of the mystery around him as a character has disappeared a bit. There plenty of it left though. A good chunk of the book is spent while he and his team investigates the mysterious disappearances of entire colonies which eventually causes them to end up in a shooting match with the bad guys. There is quite a bit of fleet action in the latter parts of this book as well although it is broken up a bit with reflections and dialogues that tend to slow i down a bit.

This brings me to the one thing that I didn’t like with the book. The author has a annoying tendency to tell the same story but from different persons viewpoint which means that he is jumping back and forth. This jumping back and forth also includes jumping in time so that you are re-reading events all the time. I was not too happy with this. I do not really find much purpose in re-reading something where I know what is happening already and occasionally this jumping around was actually confusing. If the book was not so god I would have considered this a major fault but since the reading is so good it is annoying but nothing more.

As with the first book I am looking forward to read the next. So far I would definitely put these books at the same level as work by, for instance, David Weber although I have to say that the fleet action is not as detailed and well done as David Weber usually does.