Myke Cole
(Shadow Ops #1)
Lieutenant Oscar Britton of the Supernatural Operations Corps has been trained to hunt down and take out people possessing magical powers. But when he starts manifesting powers of his own, the SOC revokes Oscar's government agent status to declare him public enemy number one.
Ugh, why is it that time after time even after looking at a cover, reading excepts and reviews, that I find myself surprised when the book is nothing like I imagined? To be fair, most times the book is "better" then the descriptions as they are used to lure in the larger common denominator. Yet in this case I once again, find just the opposite. I went in expecting a book about a world similar to ours, where magic is more common place, to follow an Elite combined forces unit made up of Magic Users and Gun operators. Kind of like a Magic wielding Delta force. Heck the cover even said "Black Hawk Down Meets the X-Men". Yet the book is farther from the truth.
What's the book really about then? It's about a near future world, where magic or mutations have manifested in a percentage of the population, where the governments around the world scared to death of this new order turns the entire world into a semi-fascist state. One where any user of magic is either killed or forced to be in the military with no chance of parole. Of course in such a harsh world order there would also be resistors like our titular hero who becomes a leader of some of these. No but first before becoming a leader, he has to be one of the most unsympathetic, most idiotic soldiers in the Army. One who honestly is a more a danger to those who follow him, then those he's supposed to fight against.
So we have an unsympathetic hero, check. We have a story about someone rebellion against the evil oppressors without a real good character growth curve, check. And we have a rather black and white representation of people, the either you are for us, or you are against us approach, check. About the only good thing is some of the battle scenes, and even then when our hero narrates to much, it gets a little to whiny.
Good concept, annoying hero. Recommend only for those die hard military sci-fi junkies.
Rated 4.00
** Update: I was reading a post by Cat Valente whose doing some guest posts for Charles Stross on his site, and she had some interesting things to say about people disliking novels, even if they are the best thing since sliced bread. To that end, let me amend that although I didn't particular enjoy this book (mostly because I really didn't like the main character, and the fact that the cover and other reviews were pretty misleading) that it wasn't that bad. It's actual writing, grammar, layout, etc was quite sound and it did flow pretty well. So it wasn't a bad book, just either very sub-genre specific (military pron) or so non-specific as to make it just blah to me. My recommendation from above still stands, but I'm also just one voice, where many others obviously DO like this novel **
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