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Title: Semper Fi
Series: The Empire's Corps #4
Author: Christopher Nuttall
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 446
Format: Digital Edition
Series: The Empire's Corps #4
Author: Christopher Nuttall
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 446
Format: Digital Edition
Synopsis:
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Commodore Singh has
taken advantage of the retreat of the Empire's forces to carve out
her own little empire. Ruling through fear and setting her
underlyings against each other, Singh has a sizeable fleet and a
highly developed tech world at her disposal. Captain Stalker and the
forces of Avalon and the ConFed are growing and they know at some
point they will come to Singh's attention. Unable to beat her through
pure force, the ConFed's must do what they can to destabilize her
power base.
Lt. Jasmine is
chosen to lead the small force of marines and support staff to
infilitrate Singh's power base and topple her regime. Starting up
insurgency groups, infiltrating the intelligence community and trying
to implement a plan that will destroy Singh's power, Jasmine is in
way over her head.
Once she gets
captured and tortured, things are looking bad. Thankfully, her
marines are loyal and rescue her and in that process capture the head
of the Intelligence group and pump him for all he is worth. This also
allows Jasmine to blackmail the next Intelligence leader and get key
people onto the space stations.
The revolution
happens, the world is nominally freed and Singh flees with a much
smaller group of ships to plan her revenge. I'm sure we haven't seen
the last of her.
My
Thoughts:
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First, this was almost ALL groundpounder action. I love Military SF
that has that as its primary core. I'm not a huge fan of spaceship
battles.
The focus this time was on Lt. Jasmine and her squad instead of on
Captain Stalker and the marines as a whole. It worked very well to
limit the main characters to less than 10 even while using side and
minor characters to flesh out the action. The villains were well done
as well. The security guy was a sick and disgusting pedo and abuser
and Nuttall did a great job of showing just how filthy he was without
going into details or making it graphic for the reader. He walked
that line perfectly. Singh wasn't quite so well done, as I found her
descent from sidelined but talented in the Empire to In Charge and
ruling through Fear a little difficult.
I think my main issue with this book was Stalker's attitude. Since he
doesn't have access to the Marine Boot Camp world he is always
lamenting how they can't have any more “Marines”. It seems rather
defeatist and not like him at all. I would think that he'd start
trying to re-create the marine training program so that even if they
can't have all the implants that the regular marines have, he
(Stalker) would have access to highly trained troops in about 2 years
instead of just having regular soldiers. I'm hoping another
character will come along in a book or two and kick the idea around
and make it happen. It NEEDS to happen if he's to keep his edge.
I didn't notice, or remember is probably more likely, any egregrious
grammar or spelling errors, so that was definitely worth a half-star
bump up.
Fun and enjoyable book in a series that is staying the course. I'm
satisfied so far.
★★★☆½
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