Liviu's Reviews > Star Nomad

Another surprising novel that kept me up late turning pages till the end and hooked me on the series at least for now; fast paced space adventure in the usual mold of unstable space polities (this takes place at the end of a civil war where a despotic/law and order civilized empire, depending on whom one asks, was mostly overthrown by a 'freedom alliance' though the Empire still holds a planet and the Alliance doesn't seem capable to offer stable government outside its few core worlds, so space and outlying planets and settlements are now dangerous places full of pirates and assorted scum and where life is short and brutal), a broken down ship whose captain (Alyssa Marchenko, formerly fighter pilot in the alliance navy, though the ship belonged to her independent trader mother and she grew up on it before going to college) needs to salvage, repair and use it to trade, make a living and find her missing daughter, while employing a motley crew including a highly dangerous former imperial cyborg officer and various other misfits, going on crazy voyages and encountering an assortment of enemies, from brutes devolved into cannibalism, to mafia types with a grudge, to well armed pirates led by other cyborgs, not to speak of deadly predators loose on a station, weird psychic power humans with unclear motives hovering in the background, mysterious artifacts,a possible plot to reinstate the empire and who knows what else to come...

anyway, similar to many other novels (most recent such I really, really enjoyed were I. Whates's Pelquin's Comet and B Chambers' Long way to a Small Angry planet), but the fun is in the characters, their interaction, the dialogue, the set-up etc and the book works superbly on all levels with such narrative power than one is compelled to keep turning the pages until the end

highly recommended and book 2 is already out as is a free story in-between (with an email subscription on the author series' website), while book 3 will most likely be available this year too