The Dark River – The Traveler Book 2

The Dark River is the second book in a trilogy by John Twelve Hawks.  I really enjoyed the first novel and decided that I really wanted to read through the remaining two.  This one was good as well, however I’m not as convinced as I once was.

The beginning of the book was slow going, but it picked up decently about a third of the way in.  In case you need a refresher, the first novel – The Traveler – was about two siblings learning and coping with finding out that not only are they travelers, but are also being hunted to near extinction because of it.  Why?  Because they can travel through reality to different realms.  This bothers people.  A lot.

In the first novel, one brother decides that he’s gonna side with the bad guys and help them out.  But wait, why would they need his help?  Well, here’s the thing, they have been communicating with a being from another dimension.  He(She?) has been  giving them the info that gives them the technical edge in the fight to eradicate the travelers.   The process to transfer information is long and slow, so now they want the traveler to cross over and  go visit for a bit.

In this book we find out that not only is their father alive, he is also a traveler, but he’s left clues to where he’s hiding.  This whole book is a giant globe trotting adventure to find a boys father so that they can defeat the evil people.  So do they find him?  Yes and no.  So they found his body, but astral* self is in another realm.  He’s been in there a while too.  So the guy they needed to help them figure out this hole traveler thing – who also happens to be their father – is out cold on a remote island in the atlantic, stuck in another realm.  Fascinating, right?

So now its a race between the good brother and the bad brother to find their Pops and get him to show them the way or, you know, kill him if your a bad guy.  Also now is when tactics need to change, cause the old ones aren’t working.

I recommend it, but I’d also recommend that you read through them all at once.  Otherwise you’ll get disjointed like me.

 

 

 

 

Leviathan Wakes

First of all, this book was so freakin’ awesome!  It’s like HALO meets, well, HALO only without the Covenant or the Master Chief.  I’ll give you guys the basics and let you decide how much it sounds like the popular game franchise.  For those of you who know what I’m talking about anyway.  Hope I didn’t already ruin if for anyone.

Moving right along.  There’s this guy, Miller.  He’s a space detective for the space station he lives on out in the middle of space.  There is also this other guy, Holden.  Used to be military, now just working a long haul shipping freighter collecting space ice.  There is also a woman, Julie.  She’s the daughter of a wealthy planet based family.  She’s also a member of a subversive organization – The Outer Planet Alliance or the OPA for short.  Then there are the planets and not planets.  Mars and earth are ruled separately and have a European Union type relationship.  Then there is the belt.  A loose collection of space stations farther out in our solar system.  They all have their own government and leaders, but ultimately they commingle and rely on each other for various resources.

Holden’s ship, an outer planet ice freighter apart of the belt, goes to investigate a distress call from another ship in the area.  The ship is dead in space and while investigating Holden and his crew find a bomb on the deck with a martian military stamp on it.  While he’s exploring this dead ship with a bomb on it, two stealth ships pop up out of nowhere and shoot some nukes at his main ship.  Well, not being one to stick around for a quick death Holden speeds away in his shuttle.  During his flight to the closest station he decides to jump on the space internet and announce what he found to the solar system – not quite accusing, but not not accusing Mars.  If you know what I mean.  Well, this stirs the pot a bit and mars starts knocking around the belt’s fleet of ships demanding Holden fly directly to a Mars, lets call it a destroyer, ship.

All this happens in the first 100 pages of the 500+ page novel.  Miller makes an entrance as a private security cop on a space station and he’s assigned by his boss to kidnap a millionaire’s daughter to bring her home.  The daughter is Julie.  On her trail he finds out that the parents knew something was going to happen and wanted to keep her from danger and two he finds out that she was on and escaped the dead ship that Holden found.  One ting leads to another and Miller and Holden meet, team up, and start to unravel the mystery.  What they find, essentially, is the flood from the Halo games.  For those of you not in the know the Flood is an organism that feeds on humans and aliens.  After it infects a bunch of people it grows sentient.  Julie was infected, after she escaped the ship she went to a space station to hide out.  Eventually the whole station gets infected.  From here it’s a super fast read.  I didn’t want to put it down.  That’s probably why I finished it in a week.

I originally bought this for my brother and then picked it up for myself a year or so later.  Many months after that I actually started reading it.  It was an awesome book and I am very excited to to read the next two in the trilogy!