Tori L Harris

**Spoilers** In TFS Ingenuity, Tori Harris offers a refurbished Area 51 first-contact story. We have been getting messages from a robotic Guardian providing keys to FTL so that we can defend ourselves from an inevitable attack by rival aliens. An evil alien survivor argues that they are the good guys who want to save us from Guardian domination. Then, we surprise everybody with some tech we got from the grays of Area 51 fame. Now we can really defend ourselves and figure out whose side we should be on. The audiobook edition is surprisingly entertaining.… (altro)

While I enjoyed this book and the series, my only complaint is that too much of it reads like an after-action report. This might be fine in small doses, but having such large chunks of so many moving parts I just kind of threw my hands in the air and had no idea what really happened. I'll maybe go looking for a synopsis to get the details. I guess maybe my wants out of this series is the story over the details. I want to know more about the Guardian and the other races. Especially the off-handed Grey's inference. I really like the set up of the human race being dragged kicking and screaming into the universe and given a pile of technology to deal with it.

I got through about 50% and had to put the book away for over a year before getting back to it. I was just bogged down with too much battle report type writing. It picked back up when the team boarded a Wek vessel to try and save people. That entire sequence I couldn't put it down. We could have had an entire book around those characters and those types of interactions and instead, we were back to battle reports which were just a let down again. I loved the combat in the first two books, but this was just too much. It reminded me of War and Peace in the early parts where Tolstoy stopped writing about the characters and ended up writing too much about the military actions against Napoleon. It becomes a slog swimming across a lake instead of being in a river where the current is taking you somewhere unexpected.… (altro)

Not a bad premise for a book, and not necessarily a "bad" book, nonetheless this military space opera is plagued with info dumps and just plain tedious writing, tedious chapters. But it gets better toward the end, and I'd be open to reading the next one in the series, just to see what happens next, as well as to see if the author has matured in their writing style to become a little less tedious. I did find the characters largely interesting, which was nice, because one can't always say that about this genre. Cautiously recommended.… (altro)