This is a book about mortality, mistakes, and consequences in the Halo special forces universe.

I'm a big fan of Karen Traviss. I really enjoyed her SW and Gears books. So I was excited when she started writing in the Halo universe. Her books are not the action packed/oriented books that we have seen from some other authors in the Halo universe as much as they are character driven stories about people. Her ability to write the special ops soldier has been well honed in her previous efforts and the characters she most focuses in this book are those characters.

Here the author ties up some of the loose ends of her Halo universe. There are certainly some things she leaves unexplored that I would have found interesting if some more time had been spent there. What about the ruins Phillips spent time exploring early on and their revelations? We see little of him, archeology, and his inner dialog in this book. What of the situation with the aliens where the humans were encouraging their civil war? We have glimpses into their situation and nothing more. The bigger picture of the Humans in the Halo universe post Covenant? Nothing there really other than the feeling that perhaps everything has remained the same.

What of Hasley? Mentioned but she never takes the stage. Before Traviss, Hasley was a hero. Someone who figured out how to help the human race build human 2.0 into a warrior that could go toe to toe like a one man army with the aliens. Traviss decided to turn her into a villain who had kidnapped children and forced them to become the saviors of mankind. Ender's game has shown that you could take children and mold them into warriors without forcing the people in charge to become monsters. While I don't recall any direct comparisons to Nazis you come away feeling like Traviss wants you to consider Hasley as just a better Dr. Mengele. I kept waiting for Hasley to somehow be redeemed or some sort of story twist where she would have some sort of vindication. But it never comes and Hasley just is made to look more and more evil with the revelation added that her original intent was to build the Spartans to fight human colonists.

The main story with Spartan Naomi is mostly resolved but not in a satisfactory manner IMHO. No one lives happily ever after and one of the characters commits suicide at the end. The ending is dark and somewhat dreary. Perhaps the author was depressed when she wrote this and thinking about some of these things herself?

While I recommend reading it for fans of Traviss or hardcore Halo universe fans I would not start Halo fans on her books. Sadly of the three series I have read by her (Star Wars Commandos, Gear of War, and Halo) I have to rate this series as third.


“But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.”
― Albert Camus
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