Armageddon is up for Auction…Dr. Melanie Destin’s life is a mess. In a desperate attempt to start over, she accepts an interplanetary salvage job that will pay her enough to rebuild a new life on Mars. When she learns the real purpose of the mission is to recover a deadly synthetic virus, everything begins to unravel… pathogen. The expedition leader plans to steal it. Planetary governments are in pursuit to recover it. The corporation that hired her wants to destroy anyone who knows of it…
With her life in danger and not knowing who to trust, Mel must find a way to keep the virus out of the wrong hands. If she fails, billions will die…
The Ares Weapon is the first book in the Mars Ascendant Series, a set of science fiction thriller novels that tell the story of humanity’s colonization of the solar system. If you like strong female characters, complex villains, intrigue and a page turning story that is hard to put down, you’ll love this book.
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A science fiction spy thriller! Excellent writing! Great dialog, fully realized characters and great plot with lots of twists and turns. Dr. Melanie Destin is fascinating with realistic travails, the spy is Fine, and the villain is despicable. I couldn’t put this book down!
This is a hot page turning book.
While humanity is attempting to colonize Mars, a weaponized virus is discovered in a crashed spaceship. A regular “who done it” coupled with what is it going to be used for stokes the depth dips of intrigue. The real question is will the heroine (a doctor with specialities in viruses) survive while most of the crew is plotting to kill her.
It took me a while to figure out why I disliked the book even though it seems fairly well written. Overall it’s a good story, but it reads to me as if a non-SF reader tried to write SciFi without really understanding the genre. This is more like an “action novel” with a somewhat futuristic background.
For readers who like that sort of thing it seems a decent read. Just not quite my bag.
The writing is in first person for the main character’s scenes and switches to third person for scenes that she would not know about (which is about half the book). This struck me as a good, innovative technique to familiarize the reader with the MC while avoiding most of the limitations of first person writing. Other reviewers may disparage this but I thought it was a good thing.
In the spectrum from “space opera” to “hard sci-fi” this is closer to hard sci-fi than not. But there’s no actual science explanations so small errors creep in. I’d still put in the hard-SciFi camp, especially on account of the realistic space combats.
The story itself is action packed with multiple plot twists and much betrayal going on. It resolves well enough despite leaving a few plot hooks for the continuing series. There were parts, however, where I got confused over which characters were who. Mostly near the beginning of the book. I think the writer could have handled that better.
My only real issue it’s with the worldbuilding, what little there is. I think the author tried to capitalize on existing future history from other authors, but didn’t do well in that. There is no decent description of the society at all. The only innovation is a reference to “the morality police”, but there’s no indication of whether that is actually different from regular police or if it’s just a derogatory term used by the MC. The character’s motivations don’t always make sense because there are inconsistencies to the societal background of the story. For example, when she decides to go back to prostitution to earn some extra cash, there’s very little motivation that would indicate she was desperate, so the implication would be that societal norms may have changed on the Lunar colony to make that less reviled than current times. But then when she gets caught the legal ramifications are so harsh that it implies just the opposite. So the end result is more confusing than interesting. Also there’s no indication whatsoever of what the Mars colony is like even though it is used as a major motivating factor for the MC. It’s as if the author tried to write as if it were written by someone from that time, so the societal background was completely assumed and just not written at all. And there aren’t clues enough to make it discernable, mostly.
Overall, I can’t recommend the book but I’m also not recommending against it. Possibly it could be a very good read for someone who prefers modern fiction but wanted to branch into other settings.
Overall: 3.5 stars out of five.
I already bought book two before reading this one, so I will continue the series. But otherwise I probably wouldn’t.