This novel had some quite good sci-fi in places, a touch of infiltration paranoia that worked ok and then the story fell away a little in other areas. It included plenty of action, worked in a range of pre-existing alien conspiracy theories (perhaps too many) and ended in what felt like North American geo-political wish fulfilment. I think it could have been a lot better than it is, perhaps if a few beta reader opinions had been gathered to make it more rounded in perspective.

I don’t want to disregard the good bits in this book when I’m only disappointed in a small proportion but I have to say that I was a little jaundiced to read the same scenario from two books in a row of wheeling a retired special forces person and their old US forces buddies out to fire weapons at any given problem. This has become a very tired plot line now because it's been used hundreds of times since the Nam-obsessed 1980s (A-Team, Stargate, Lethal Weapon, Predator and every second Schwarzenegger film ever made have all exhausted this idea). Too much gung-ho puts off the non-US market (198 countries) because these archetypes aren’t humanity’s champions, just America’s champions and it puts the reader in a quandary over whether they still sympathise with the hero. To specify, I had just finished a novel called The Neuromorphs (retired American SEAL team tackles robots) and picked up Alien Blood (retired American SEAL team tackles aliens) and started to get irked by this seemingly being the only solution authors come up with to futuristic situations. Isaac Asimov in Foundation, for example, used negotiation, trade, belief systems and diplomacy to overcome problems. Others have used insight or humour or made it irrelevant through a change of scale or dimension. It takes extra imagination to do that but the reader appreciates an effort.

I don’t think I can tell you the conspiracy theories that turn out to be correct in this story without spoiling it for other readers but I can say that several differentiated alien species are involved, as is the idea that pictogram languages (like Linear B and the hieroglyphs) aren’t entirely our invention. The mainstay of the tale is given away in the blurb, so I am free to repeat it: The United States alone has a pact with alien visitors, which is about to expire and so everything’s in flux. Certain unpalatable demands are being made of governments and decades of secrets are being kept out of the public domain. Some humans are of more interest to the alien races than others and the phenomena around abduction concerns their unique genetic markers. You’ll need to read the book to discover why they’re special, what’s on the dark side of the moon, what tech is on secret bases, how everyone is motivated and which species gets the upper hand.

Just a final word to say there’s no original alien species design in this book as either they are the ufologists’ standard types (Grays, Nordics etc.) or they have become virtual life where you just get to meet the speaker-phone, a bit like Charlie’s Angels. I think the wonder of space fiction is to think up and present something new, on top of what’s gone before. The trouble with the standard types from encounter reports is that they all look like slightly distorted humans. The adventure was good enough and combined several topics into different combinations but I think it’s fair to drop a mark or two for missing an opportunity to bring truly original ideas to this genre. The thing on the Moon could have galvanised the planet and lit up our perspective but not enough was made of it. If the arms race and putting certain countries ahead of their competitors is the main thing we think of when considering our place in the Universe, that ends my enthusiasm. ( )