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Saturday, March 23, 2013
Synopsis:

 A finalist in the 2011 Next Generation Indie Book Awards.

"It will be interesting to discover which will make you beg. Will it be the pain or the pleasure?"

How do you tame a man without breaking his spirit?

The galaxy is under siege from alien invaders. The Empire is the only force that stands in their way, trading the freedom of its citizens for a tenuous security.

Amidst this chaos, Lt. Adrian Stannis is a brilliant scientist trying to stay out of the limelight. He hides on a research vessel plying the Outer Rim and finds peace of a sort with Kali Mirren, a psi-enabled humanoid. But his days of anonymity may be coming to an end. Someone has discovered his secret and is determined to make him pay for his treachery. He must finish the project he abandoned years ago, one the Council deems essential in its fight against the aliens, but things are never that simple where Adrian is concerned.

Is he more man than machine, or have years hiding behind a mountain of logic eroded his humanity? Can he survive the tangled web of political expediency and psychological manipulation that surrounds him? Will Kali be able to save him from himself, or is there a mystery surrounding him that may explode in their faces?

Everyone wants to know the truth, but will it set them free?


My Review:

Upon opening this book, I was not sure at all what to expect. Not unlike most of the books I read for review, I rarely read the synopsis until I write the review. This was the same with this book, and because of this I expected something about a failing government or at the very least an unfair one. I was correct in my assumption. It is indeed about a government that was not doing well. The better part of the story was about Adrian and from what I can understand his empire upbringing. 

We have a hard time getting to know Adrian, but do not be fooled this is not the result of faulty writing. Our inability to get into the mind of this character was completely on purpose. With the upbringing by the empire, he was not touch emotions or things that would round out his personality. He was raised because of his genius as sort of a human computer. 


The interaction between Adrian and Kali in this tale, at first is very one sided but towards the end of the book you can see that Adrian is not the computerized human that the empire wishes him to be. Her telepathic abilities enable her to help Adrian and form a bond with him during some very cruel and inhumane torture. Apparently the way the empire gets people to conform is to break them mentally and then program to follow whatever the empire wishes. 


It was exciting to stand behind the scenes and root for Adrian and Kali to get away from the evil people that comprised the empire and their political structure. I could have done without some of the more graphic scenes but I understood why they were necessary. I am rating this book a 4 out of 5 and feel that this is an excellent beginning to a wonderful series.





About the Author:

Elizabeth Lang was an avid reader from an early age. Science Fiction and Fantasy were and still are her passions, with occasional dips in the pools of Mystery. She has spent many years in the IT industry and started writing late in life, but once begun, she couldn't stop.
Elizabeth lives in Canada though she's worked in many places around the world. She loves traveling, learning about different cultures, and sampling their delectable foods.

She writes mainly scifi thrillers/psychological dramas, though she did accidentally end up with a scifi romance novel. She swears she has no idea how that happened.

Elizabeth has also written some humour, mainly wacky stuff that comes to her mind in the wee hours of the morning when her brain refuses to acknowledge being attached to the rest of her.

She has also dabble in a bit of poetry, but barely enough to get her toes wet.
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1 comments:

Unknown said...

Thank you for the review.