[BT] MW:DA #28 - Fire At Will, by Blaine Lee Pardoe - 2.5/4 stars
Tim Skirvin
Dark Ages novels, as I read them; I've been posting them on Amazon for
a while, but that seems less helpful than posting them to Usenet. It's
going to take a while to figure out how to balance the various audiences,
but I'll do my best.)
_Fire At Will_ continues the focus of the MW:DA series on the
actions surrounding the borders between the Lyran Commonwealth, the
(formers) Free Worlds League, and (to a lesser extent) the Republic of the
Sphere. This is a marked departure from the start of the series, which
focused on the Republic alone; but this also has made for more interesting
books, with more politics and wider-scale action, more along the lines of
the Battletech novels published just before the MW:DA time jump.
In this case, the novel focuses on the Lyran invasion of the
FWL. As we learned in _Pandora's Gambit_, the League is finally beginning
to re-merge into a single political force once again, after decades of
internal fighting; but the associated saber-rattling has offered a
much-desired excuse for the Lyran government to pre-emptively invade their
neighbours.
I was somewhat surprised at how well this novel fit in with its
predecessor; we don't often get both sides of the same general war in such
quick succession. Both the Lyrans and the various Marik factions came
across as sympathetic and thoughful; only the main villains' plans (Duke
Brewster) really came across as ludicrous.
I still wish it was as good as _Surrender Your Dreams_, Pardoe's
best work to date. But this was pretty good. I didn't feel like I wasted
my time...
** 1/2
- Tim Skirvin (tski...@killfile.org)
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