I know it’s been a while since the last book review, but fear no more, I’ve been reading and have a few in line for the next few days :)
The first new review is about one of the books in John Ringo’s Paladin of Shadows series, also called the Ghost series. This series starts with his book Ghost (which, incidentaly, was the first book I reviewed here :) and it’s, up to today, comprised of three already published books and a fourth forthcoming book:
and the book to come, Unto the Breach, which is set to be published in hardcover some time in december of 2006, but if you like electronic formats (like I do) you can acquire the ARC (Advanced Reader’s Copy) of the book in electronic format in Baen’s Webscription site (which is how I got my hands on it).
Since for Ghost I already wrote a review, I’ve decided that I’m going to do a review-per-book instead of my usual review of the whole series. So in this first review, we’ll look at Kildar.
Ex-Seal Mike Harmon has bought the farm-literally,
in Eastern Europe. But trouble follows him even there, and the man who
has made himself anathema to terrorists from Syria to Paris suddenly has
Chechen terrorists banging on his own door..
Kildar starts some time after Ghost ends, with Mike Harmon traveling over Eastern Europe and finding himself lost somewhere in the mountains in Georgia (the country, not the state, as Mike continuously reminds people), with a snow blizzard starting to pick up, while trying to drive to a ski resort. In the middle of the storm, he finds himself almost running over a girl who is walking on the backroad he’s traveling on, carrying a bundle of firewood over her back.
After such an auspicious start (rescuing hot redheads in a mountain road is always an auspicious start to anything :), she guides him to her house, where Mike gets to meet her father and the whole lot of family…getting his first introduction to the interesting world of the Keldara. Katrina’s father points Mike towards the nearest town, Alerrso, and then procedes to yell at Katrina as soon as the door closes behind Mike’s back, threatening to marry her off or “sell her to town”, for spending time unescorted with a male, which is against the basic social rules of the Keldara.
Soon therafter, we find Mike trying to decide how to deal with being stuck in a small and barely civilized town during the time he’ll be there, because he’s told the roads will take at least a week to be cleared enough for him to try to get to Bakuriana, his original destination. The local constabulary commander, Captain Vadim Tyurin, very helpfull fellow that he is, also informs Mike that the Georgian government doesn’t really rule the Keldara Valley they are in…he and three soldiers are all there’s to it as far as government presence, and the chechenians are just a couple of hundred kilometers away, with the guerrilla ruling the land.
Captain Tyurin takes Mike to a tour of the town, and here we learn that the old Silk Road (that was used to take silk from China to the Roman Empire) runs smack down the valley they are in, and shows him the local caravanserai, a huge building that shows architectural evidence of the many different peoples that had dominated the area during history, from the Romans to the Mongols and the Ottomans.
As time passes, Mike is more and more convinced that he’d like to stay in town and ends up buying the caravanserai from the local bank, with the added detail that with the caravanserai, he’s buying the entire Keldara Valley…and the people in it, not as slaves or serfs, but as tenants. With ownership of the caravanserai comes the title of Kildar, and we find out why the book has that name :)
The adventures of Mike’s introduction to the Keldara and being the Kildar make for a lot of fun and entretaining, specially as they start to involve him in all the different ceremonies that the Keldara perform as time goes by.
Once taken, the responsibility weights down on Mike’s shoulders, and he decides that if he’s going to be a feudal lord, he’ll be a good feudal lord, so he takes the Keldara and starts training them so he can have an army to defend the valley from chechen incursions, which he doesn’t like…specially when he finds out that the chechens mostly come through to transport drugs and kidnap women to sell as prostitutes/slaves in the white slave trade over all of Europe.
He brings in cadre from the US and the UK, hiring ex-soldiers of all the different branches with the money the US government paid him for the deeds we read about in Ghost, and decides to not only bring in first-rate cadre, but also first-rate equipment, not only military, but also for the farms that are now his. Tractors, trucks, SUVs, rifles, granades and uniforms start coming in from all the different parts of the world where one buys such things, and the Kildar is getting his people ready to defend themselfs.
During this time, Mike and the Kaldara intercept a kidnapping team from the chechens, and Mike ends up having every man’s fantasy fullfilled…he ends up with a harem of hot looking young women, and even some barely pubescent girls (which he, decently, decides not to do anything with until they are 15yo…how decent of him :)
How did he end up keeping the kidnap victims, you ask? Well…the social norms of the area say that any single women who is alone with a man, unescorted by a married woman, has lost her viability to be married off, so their families just don’t want them back. Also, some of the girls had been sold out to become slaves/prostitutes by their own families…that’s what being “sold to town” means. And Mike, being Mike, couldn’t resist the temptation of doing a good deed (provide for the girls) and getting laid for his troubles :)
We also get to meet two girls other girls (besides Katrina) who become more important as the story is developed in this book and the next two. First we get to meet Katya. She’s the most cold hearted bitch to ever grace the face of the earth…to the point that Mike isn’t interested in bedding her, even if she’s an incredibly hot blonde.
The second important girl we get to meet is Anastasia. She’s given to Mike by a sheik in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, in echange of “owning him a favour”. She was the harem manager for the sheik, but she was getting too old for his tastes (she’s in her early twenties :) and her replacement had already been trained, so…he just gave her away to Mike.
During the Keldara’s first training mission for mountain patrol they end up tangling with a guerilla group more than three times the size of the training group. What we learn is that the Keldara are natural born killers, kicking the ass of the chechens up and down the mountain until there’s nothing but a few stragglers left. As the story unfolds in this and the other two books, we’ll understand how come they became such stone cold bastards after just a few weeks of training, but it does make sense…I just don’t want to spoil it for you :)
And the book ends with the baptism of the Tigers of the Mountains, the Keldara militia.
I quite enjoyed this book, both in the military settings and in the part that makes this series different from the rest of Ringo’s stuff, the sex :) He writes, as usual, believable battle scenes, with tactics and strategy playing an important part, and he, as in Ghost, writes very intense and arousing sex scenes. All in all, a great book, part of what is becoming a very interesting series.
Technorati Tags: books, military fiction, sexuality, john ringo, kildar, ghost series, paladin of shadows series, baen books
Tags: Books, Reviews
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