It also did an amazing job building momentum. It made me feel involved, and the incremental reveal of each new piece of info was perfectly done. Planetside also offered an interesting mystery to solve, and I particularly enjoyed the intel-gathering aspect of the story. I think Colonel Butler could’ve been just sitting there reading a newspaper and I still would’ve eaten up every moment. In some ways, he reminded me a bit of both Avasarala (Expanse – she’s the bomb) and John Perry (Old Man’s War), to give you an idea the type of character profile we’re dealing with here. He had a very no-bullshit approach to things, and his dry humor cracked me up constantly.

Right off the bat I loved the main character. It’s about a semi-retired Colonel who gets recruited to investigate circumstances surrounding a missing lieutenant. Planetside is one of the best books I’ve read this year!!Įverything about it hit the spot. The answers are there-Butler just has to make it back alive… Butler has no choice but to drop down onto a hostile planet-because someone is using the war zone as a cover. The colonel quickly finds Cappa Base to be a labyrinth of dead ends and sabotage: the hospital commander stonewalls him, the Special Ops leader won't come off the planet, witnesses go missing, radar data disappears, and that’s before he encounters the alien enemy. The young lieutenant had been wounded and evacuated-but there's no record of him having ever arrived at hospital command. A high councilor's son has gone MIA out of Cappa Base, the space station orbiting a battle-ravaged planet. So when Colonel Carl Butler answers the call from an old and powerful friend, he knows it's something big-and he's not being told the whole story. War heroes aren't usually called out of semi-retirement and sent to the far reaches of the galaxy for a routine investigation. A seasoned military officer uncovers a deadly conspiracy on a distant, war-torn planet…

Michael mammay planetside