Ace 2004; 389 pages

 

After a spectacular rescue of a little girl from terrorists on a neighboring planet, Kris is relegated to humanitarian duty on a planet whose environment has gone haywire from man-made interference. She realizes that her assignment may not be coincidence, and that her brush with death on the kidnapping rescue mission may not have been coincidence, either.

 

When I picked up Kris Longnife: Mutineer off Amazon, I did it because a lot of people seemed to like the book, the cover is cool, and it’s about a woman military type and I think it’s cool for a woman to be able to fight. Not very good reasons to choose a book, as I found out. It’s not a poorly written book, but neither is it stellar writing, and after coming off the high after reading Bujold’s Curse of Chalion, it was hard not to compare the flat prose and boring characters.

 

The opening chapters are slow and pedantic. It’s supposed to be this exciting rescue mission, but we’re instead jerked out of the here-and-how with too many flashbacks from not only when her brother was kidnapped and murdered, but her troubled teenage years.

 

Shepherd's prose is basic, rife with cliché and not descriptive beyond the required setting elements and sci fi technological details. This story is all about plot, no doubt, as one event after another occurs, strung along as we follow Kris’s travels from one planet to another. You’d think that all this information was to build up for a spectacular ending. But…the climax events have little direct relation with Kris’s actions in the rest of the book, which, as a plot-based book, should have tied more directly into the main body of the story.

 

The characterization is little more developed than the setting. Shepherd attempts to give Kris flaws, but this 21-year-old woman is a know-it-all with better solutions than her more experienced senior officers. It goes so far beyond reality it suspends belief. She always knows the right thing to do. I don’t remember being that mature and smart when I was 21. Shepherd tries to write Kris as a woman, really he does, but in essence she’s a man in a woman’s body with a few irrational emotional episodes tucked in for good measure. I had a hard time identifying with this woman on any level. Kris does have issues she struggles through, it's just that Shepherd isn't very subtle about it.

 

If you like a good adventure, perhaps compared to Gemmel's books, where your hero is a truly heroic, then you will probably like this book. Otherwise, I probably won't read the rest of the books in this series, just because I can't care enough about Kris to do it.