Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆
Not sure I’ve ever read a book with three authors before, though Amazon omit Noe from the list given on Goodreads. This “novel by committee” might explain some of the problems with this, and its failure to mesh the two strands in any effective way. It’s a pity, as it starts off in entirely blistering fashion, with the arrival on Earth of the Syndicate, an extra-terrestrial invading army. We knew they were coming, so humanity’s forces take them on, in a massive and spectacular battle at their landing site in Mexico. It doesn’t go well for us, thanks to the attacker’s vastly superior technology. Survivors are few, but include Marines Quinn and Giovanni.
The former is one of the soldiers abducted by the Syndicate and taken up into their orbiting mother-ship. There, she’s given an ultimatum: fight for the Syndicate or be turned into a mindless zombie… and fight for them anyway. With a 12-year-old daughter, Sammy, back on Earth – albeit status unknown – Quinn decides to accept the offer, but keeps her fingers crossed, so to speak. She teams up with another abductee, a scientist who might have found the germ of a way by which the Syndicate can be defeated. Though they’ll have to stop their employers from finding out about it.
This aspect isn’t too bad, with no shortage of solid action sequences, even if I’m still not sure about the method behind their plan. Except there was time travel involved. Definitely time travel. Somehow. Anyway, it’s the kind of thing I can easily imagine becoming a major Hollywood picture. That makes some sense, since Mahaffey’s bio says he’s a screenwriter – despite his IMDb listing including nothing to have ever made it to the screen. The problems are back on Earth where Giovanni has joined up with the resistance and… Well, nothing of importance happens. Possibly his character becomes relevant in future volumes, but here, he serves little or no purpose to proceedings.
Oh, except for being gay, that is. I’ve no problem with that, but it’s handled in such an incredibly clumsy way. It’s announced as he and his lover, Luke, “had largely ignored whatever it was that had happened that night between them.” Except that’s the first we heard of it. I literally went flicking back to try and see if I’d skipped something. But short of there being an entire chapter missing, there was nothing. And then there’s this sentence, which literally made me cringe when I read it. “‘FUCK ME!’ Luke shouted, and Giovanni couldn’t help but think how under different circumstances he would love to hear those words.” Giovanni’s near-absence from much of the second half of the book is likely a blessing, but his presence in the first half almost single-handedly destroyed any interest for me in reading further installments.
Author: Justin Sloan, Kyle Noe + George S. Mahaffey Jr.
Publisher: Elder Tree Press, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 5 in the Syndicate Wars series.