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Hangfire | Rating | |
| A | |||
| David Sherman and Dan Cragg | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| Starfist | First to Fight, School of Fire, Steel Gauntlet, Blood Contact, Technokill, Hangfire, Kingdom's Swords, Kingdom's Fury | ||
Havanagas is a planet devoted to tourism. It has casinos and wilderness expeditions, fishing trips and theme parks. It even has theme cities, whole districts devoted to replicating first centruty Rome or Midieval Europe or pre-contact Polynesian islands. It is a place most in the Confederation aspire to one day visit, if they can scrape together enough money for it. And it is controlled by the mob, who use it as a base for all their schemes off world. Because they control the planet, nearly everyone is employed by them, giving them unparalleled security and control. And dissidents are thrown into the arena at Rome to provide a good show for the tourists.
Assistant Attorney General Thom Nast wants to get the mob out of Havanagas. All his agents have been exposed by corrupt workers in the Ministry of Justice. So he turns to the Marines. Three Marines, to be specific: Dean, Claypoole, and Pasquin. They're to "vacation" on Havanagas, make contact with the undercover agent Nast managed to keep hidden, and get the information he'd collected so the bad guys can be convicted. Simple. But these are Marines, not undercover officers...
The storytelling skill of the authors continues to improve. There was no silly, unneccesary flashbacks, and most of the characters acted like people. The means by which the Marines are discovered by the mob (hardly a spoiler - surely it was inevitable) starts out being so tried it is almost cliché, but fairly quickly readers learn that it isn't quite so simple. And there is a twist or two thrown in, as well.
And for the first time there are two plots. In fact, there are three! The first subplot involved the FIST Commander taking it upon himself to discover just why nobody under his command is receiving the usual orders to ship out and transfer to another FIST. IT's supposed to happen to each Marine after a year or two stationed in any one FIST, but some of these men have been with the 34th for over four! Sturgeon takes a trip to Earth itself to find the truth.
And just as that subplot begins to peter out, another fades in to take its place. This involves an alien invasion of a frontier world - no mere scientific station like Society 437, but a world that has been colonized for decades or centuries. This marks another first: it isn't anywhere near concluded by the end of the book, making it the first truly multibook plotline attempted.
I'm still not especially impressed by the worldbuilding skills of Sherman and Cragg. But here, it is less a matter of what they did wrong as how they failed to address my complaints from previous books here. Havanagas is also a little hard to take. I can well believe in the mob doing what they do in the book, it's just that when the victims break the fourth wall and scream to the audience for help, telling them it's no act and this is a real murder, you'd think some might be a little suspicious. And I don't care how many years in the future it is, if I saw an "android" being evicerated by dinosaur-like creatures live, right in front of me, and intestines and blood came out, I think I'd be more than a little dubious of any claims of "special effects."
This book gets the extra-gfood grade mostly because it is significantly more complex than any others the authors had previously attempted. And, by and large, they pull it off. The arrangement of traps, double-crosses, and secret loyalties were really quite clever, I thought, and the addition of seperate subplots was an excellent addition. Fans of the series will be unlikely to be disappointed in this issue.
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