Books : Valiant (The Lost Fleet, Book 4 of 6)

Rating: - Not great writing, but entertaining
Similar in plot and structure to the last three books. The love triangle between Geary and the two women in his life is becoming a bit of a soap. However, Campbell has found a formula and is sticking to it. good for him!

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Rating: - The Plot, like the Fleet, goes lumbering on
To cut a long story short... there's this long-lost hero, back from the dead, who has picked up the role of leading a space navy home, fighting two or three battles in every book. There are romantic subplots (badly written), politics (OK) and hints of alien interventions (annoying) but what makes this series are the depictions of the military encounters, which are tensely written with just enough inventiveness to keep them fresh.

If that sounds your cup of tea (Earl Grey, hot?) then you should start with book one Dauntless (The Lost Fleet, Book 1) and quickly work through to the previous entry in the series Courageous (The Lost Fleet, Book 3 of 6): 3, which was a really good example of this genre. This entry is a little off the boil - the subplots predominate and the battles are not as well imagined. I'm glad that it's now been announced that there are six books in the series, as I was wondering if the fleet would ever get home, or if it would just wander through space losing ships (and the plot) as the books went on. Here's hoping books 5 and 6 pick up the pace a bit.

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Rating: - the enemy within
for the uninitiated: this is a series of science fiction novels telling the ongoing story of the lost fleet, a group of spaceships in a future war between two human groups called the alliance and the syndic. the fleet comes from the former, and they got lost behind enemy lines and would have been doomed had they not found john geary. the legendary black jack, who fought in a battle at the start of the war one hundred years previously and was stuck in suspended animation ever since. geary is now in command, struggling to deal with the myth that has built up around him in the meantime, and trying to get the fleet back home. These books are not great literature by a long way, but they're capably written and feature good space battles.

you could probably pick the story up here, but to get the most out of the series go back to the first volume and read them in order.

for those who have been following this series:

this one like all of them runs roughly 286 pages, and picks up where the previous book in the series left off. like that one, it also takes about a hundred pages to really get going. the first hundred pages are taken up with more space battles, which are well described but not the most exciting ones so far.

after this, though, the book does get going. geary this time faces the threat of his enemies inside the fleet taking action. he has to try and find them, and make a few more tough decisions along with it.

subplots do move on a bit here. the romantic love triangle he's been in gets a bit of resolution. the aliens mentioned in book three don't appear but we learn a little more about them. and an interesting subplot about the course of the war begins. it will be interesting to see how it develops.

not quite the best in the series, but enough to make me want to know what will happen next

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Rating: - Does what it says on the tin
OK, so you aren't going to have this bound in hand-tooled calfskin to reread.

But I've been out in the galaxy for a few hours-is there another sinister enemy? How is the fleet going to get home/tackle baddies/survive? People inside the fleet are posing difficulties...

I'm totally hooked.

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Rating: - Another short but entertaining read
These books are a very tried and tested formula but they are very easy to read not very chalanging but extremely hard to put down..

If you liked the first three this is a must..