Eeeee-Books

In 2015 the prolific Christopher Nuttall introduced Katherine "Kat" Falcone, a young officer in His Majesty's Tyrian Navy taking her first command. The youngest of one of Tyre's ruling families, Kat was widely seen as having had her path smoothed by her powerful relatives to a position she was not qualified to hold. But she proved more than equal to the task and soon became a top commander in the Tyrian Navy's fight against the expansionist Theocracy, a space nation bent on enslaving every world possible to its repressive religion. In 2017 Kat led the assault on the Theocracy's home world, setting the stage for a second sequence of novels that Nuttall called "The Embers of War." With Debt of War he closes that trilogy and brings the Tyrian civil war that bloomed in the aftermath of the war with the Theocracy.

Kat and forces loyal to the king are on Caledonia, one of the main Tyrian words and headquarters of the groups loyal to the throne. The House of Lords remains on Tyre, marshaling resources to defeat the king and bring him to heel; they're led politically by Kat's brother and militarily by her best friend, William McElney. Nearsighted politicians on both sides try to goad the respective military forces to attack, but even though Kat knows that would be a risky move she also knows that the king's side can't afford a long war of attrition. The Tyrian homeworld will soon be able to return to war footing production and overwhelm the king's forces with sheer weight of metal. William, on the other hand, has just learned information that completely upends the basis of the conflict and could convince Kat she has been wrong all along -- can he manage to get it to her?

Despite his high-volume output Nuttall doesn't rush material into print; Debt of War's style flows cleanly if not with any particular flash of bells and whistles. He also keeps his characters straight; Kat remains pretty much the same throughout the series, as does William. There's a bit of a disconnect between King Hadrian in the initial books and in the trilogy that shows signs the transition between the two roles he plays in the different storylines wasn't as smooth as it could have been. And the frequent observations about the need to take a risk to end the war even though the downside is complete disaster grow a little tiring. The Debt series could probably have fit into two books. But still it's a pretty interesting take on the space opera genre: What if the brave and insightful commander at the center of it all, the one whose dash and daring brought victory after victory to her homeworld...chose the wrong side?

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Alex Cassidy has a pretty good reputation as an FBI senior agent but she's been put in charge of a crop of misfits. Several of them have been eased out of other offices because they're more of a problem than they're worth in the eyes of their previous supervisors. Nevertheless, they work for the FBI and they're supposed to solve crimes, so Alex will make them work as a team and get the job done in Mark Ravine's first novel, The Tech. As for the odd coincidences and breaks that seem to serendipitously make their jobs easier and offer leads when it seems there weren't any to be had? Well those are just plain good luck...or are they?

Each chapter in The Tech outlines one of the cases the unit is handling, and highlights Alex's efforts to smooth out their rough edges and get past whatever hangup kept them giving other supervisors trouble. As they do, evidence that something else is going on, both on the side of the bad guys as well as the good guys, continues to mount and indicate conspiracies behind the crimes they're facing. Alex and her team had better solve at least one of them or else they may be in danger of more than reputations as troublemakers.

The Tech is full of first-novel touches, including stilted dialogue and frequent choices to tell instead of show the reader something. The different team members are tough to keep separated and sorted as to what their trouble spots where, especially when those seem to vanish and reappear according to no real narrative pattern. There are some interesting ideas here and clear hints of an overall storyline with some real legs to it, but subsequent novels will need a lot of polishing to bring that out.

It could also be considerably shorter. The individual cases might be necessary to peel back deeper and deeper layers of the conspiracy and other mysteries surrounding this particular FBI field office but put between the same covers they make for a pretty long slog. The Tech could have benefited greatly by being a series of short novellas with a slightly longer resolution novel, like Stephen King's The Green Mile or Dean Koontz's "Nameless" series. Sure, King and Koontz can make a publisher do any number of things that a first-time novelist can't, but it's hard to argue that slicing the chapters up into even more distinct chunks could have helped refine and tighten the overall story and given the two interesting final answers some more impact. If Ravine returns to these characters maybe he'll have the chance to do something like that.