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Title: Semper Fi
Series: The Empire's Corps #4
Author: Christopher Nuttall
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 446
Format: Digital Edition

Synopsis:

Commodore Singh has taken advantage of the retreat of the Empire's forces to carve out her own little empire. Ruling through fear and setting her underlyings against each other, Singh has a sizeable fleet and a highly developed tech world at her disposal. Captain Stalker and the forces of Avalon and the ConFed are growing and they know at some point they will come to Singh's attention. Unable to beat her through pure force, the ConFed's must do what they can to destabilize her power base.

Lt. Jasmine is chosen to lead the small force of marines and support staff to infilitrate Singh's power base and topple her regime. Starting up insurgency groups, infiltrating the intelligence community and trying to implement a plan that will destroy Singh's power, Jasmine is in way over her head.

Once she gets captured and tortured, things are looking bad. Thankfully, her marines are loyal and rescue her and in that process capture the head of the Intelligence group and pump him for all he is worth. This also allows Jasmine to blackmail the next Intelligence leader and get key people onto the space stations.

The revolution happens, the world is nominally freed and Singh flees with a much smaller group of ships to plan her revenge. I'm sure we haven't seen the last of her.

My Thoughts:

First, this was almost ALL groundpounder action. I love Military SF that has that as its primary core. I'm not a huge fan of spaceship battles.

The focus this time was on Lt. Jasmine and her squad instead of on Captain Stalker and the marines as a whole. It worked very well to limit the main characters to less than 10 even while using side and minor characters to flesh out the action. The villains were well done as well. The security guy was a sick and disgusting pedo and abuser and Nuttall did a great job of showing just how filthy he was without going into details or making it graphic for the reader. He walked that line perfectly. Singh wasn't quite so well done, as I found her descent from sidelined but talented in the Empire to In Charge and ruling through Fear a little difficult.

I think my main issue with this book was Stalker's attitude. Since he doesn't have access to the Marine Boot Camp world he is always lamenting how they can't have any more “Marines”. It seems rather defeatist and not like him at all. I would think that he'd start trying to re-create the marine training program so that even if they can't have all the implants that the regular marines have, he (Stalker) would have access to highly trained troops in about 2 years instead of just having regular soldiers. I'm hoping another character will come along in a book or two and kick the idea around and make it happen. It NEEDS to happen if he's to keep his edge.

I didn't notice, or remember is probably more likely, any egregrious grammar or spelling errors, so that was definitely worth a half-star bump up.

Fun and enjoyable book in a series that is staying the course. I'm satisfied so far.

★★★☆½ ( )