Gunn and Salvo, Books 4-7, Joshua James.
Infinite Grey (Gunn and Salvo #5), November 2021 (174pg)
Outward Sky (Gunn and Salvo #6), December 2021 (171pg)
Starlit Path (Gunn and Salvo #7), December 2022 (173pg)
Beyond Sol (Gunn and Salvo #8), February 2023 (174pg)
I read the omnibus version of books 1-4 from this series back in mid-2022 and gave it a 6.5/10. The conclusion to the series has tricked out since late 2021, and brings our interstellar bounty hunters’ long struggle against the enigmatic interstellar menace of the Dolus to a close. The plot doesn’t stray far from the common outlines most space opera readers will know and presumably love. It is smoothly executed, though.
“Gunn’s head was spinning from the abundance of Pashas, none of whom looked quite like either the alien he’d spoken to earlier, or his Pasha. He would have struggled to make sense of it all if this had happened a few months ago, but after everything he’d been through since Regency had stumbled into his life, he couldn’t muster the gumption for yet another existential crisis”
As with the first four books, the bottom line is lots of fun, entertaining, and easy to stick with. Spinning the story line out this long isn’t easy, but this stays fresh enough to keep the pages turning, helped by a sometimes-dizzying array of secondary characters. And while no one is going to mistake them for refugees from a Dostoevsky novel, the characters grapple with very human emotions and now and then display detectable evolution.
Technically, some earlier books, but it’s the same series.
The downside: while the plot and characters are richer than average they are (still) a little short of compelling, and the impact is let down a bit by cliched language—although the writing/editing seems to be improved. (The first five books featured the laziest word in SFF (“smirk” and its variants) 25 times in 846 pages (a smirk every 33.4 pages) while these four had only 14 of them in 692 pages, down to one every 49 pages. This is progress…)
Highly recommended!
Smirk factor: Acceptable: 1 pt (14 smirks and so forth in 692 pages)
Immersion factor: Chest-high: 1.5pts
Writing quality: Above-average: 1.5pts
Character/plot development: Above-average: 1.5 pts
Innovative/interesting: Above-average: 1.5 pts
Total: 7/10 (3.5 stars, rounded to 4) (Goodreads average 4.48 stars)
I don’t know if “Space Marine” or “Space Fleet” are the first words I think of when I look at these books, but who am I to argue with Amazon?