Drifter's War

3 stars, Metaphorosis reviews

Summary
Pik, notorious smuggler, and Melissa, daughter of his drunken companion, are enjoying rare relaxation at an elite resort when a mediabot crawls out of the ocean and they're back to running. But when they finally reach the alien ship they found previously, it seems to have plans of its own for where they go.

Review
I've read Drifter's War previously, and hadn't actually meant to re-read it, but got my figures mixed. I knew I had two of the trilogy in my print library, but thought it was the first two books, so picked up this third one on sale. Turns out, it had been books two and three, and both of them disappeared in a brutal library culling a few years back. So, I spent half the book trying to figure out why it was so very familiar and only checked my data later. The result is that, rather than discovering the culmination of the trilogy, I was revisiting it.

I can see why I thought I was one book short, since it seems evident Dietz intended four books – the last of which is crammed ruthlessly into a short epilogue instead of being set out in full on its own. It's an awkward and unsatisfying ending.

This particular book, sans epilogue, is a decent military sci-fi story with some neat twists. It's got a little outside saviour element to it – humans coming to rescue and lead enslaved natives – but it works reasonably well. There's not much attempt at three dimensions here – the villains literally look like devils and act like them. But the foreground characters are appealing, and the story moves smoothly.

This (and its predecessor, if I recall), are satisfactory if unchallenging adventure drama with just enough alien ruin mystery to keep things interesting.

This is clearly OCRed from a print edition, courtesy of Open Road Media, and, as is common with some of their books, they clearly didn't put much effort into it. My read through had me marking a few dozen errors that a casual review should have spotted.