Fortress Frontier (Shadow Ops 2) [Paperback]

Following up an excellent debut novel is always going to be hard! Myke Coles first offering
Control Point (Shadow Ops 1) was awesome! The premise, the characters, the writing!
He set the bar pretty damn high!
It's Myke Coles unique Military background that make this such a compelling and convincing read!
If you've already read the first book then you won't need my opinion before buying this book,
but if you haven't then I strongly suggest buying both books and I hope you enjoy the ride!

great author his books has kept my imagination going loved it. . . . . . . . . .

This is the second in Myke Cole's magical, militaristic series set in the near future - and I enjoyed it more than the first, Control Point (Shadow Ops 1). The action overlaps between the two books with a new central character, Bookbinder, developing psy-powers at the start of Frontier Fortress. Then we catch up with the cast of Control Point for a while, before the plot drags everyone together for a slam-bam fighting finale. It's a ripping read which I tore through in a couple of days.

In this universe, humans have been sprouting psy abilities of different types since magic started seeping through realities, from another plane called the Source. The Source is inhabited by a variety of freaky and fearsome creatures - some of them friendly to the human outposts, most not. The US military trains units of the more acceptable psy-soldiers who can light fires, form earth, control water, and so on - and out-sources those gifted with the nastier abilities to deniable contractors. In America, you have few choices if you suddenly demonstrate psy powers - Bookbinder is yanked out of his usual deskjob as a high-ranking army paper-pusher and punted into the front line in another dimension. Many people choose to go underground and flee the restrictive system, and of course the govt lies to the people about exactly what's going on...
Bookbinder is an interesting character who starts off as a middle-aged career solder family man who's never seen action in his life. He's more worried about his bowel movements than being blasted by a goblin or a dragon. His transfer to the forward base in the Source, and the rapid unravelling of events forms the backbone of the book - it's a convincing tale of how he must face up to his responsibilities under fire... or die trying.
The middle section where we catch up with all the people from the first book is less successful. Apart from Oscar Britton (the only person who can open a portal to rescue the cut-off troops in the Source), most of the other characters are hard to pin down. They swap between names and call-signs - I didn't really get a hold of them all in Control Point, and again found little to remember about them this time around.
The two plots are neatly tied together, however, and we meet a bunch more interesting supernatural types in Frontier Fortress. There are plenty of parallels with the real world - you can draw your own conclusions with the relations between indigenous peoples, or how earth's 'allies' barely seem to be co-operating. I adored the Indian outpost and its supernatural, sentient semi-gods.

There's a whole heap of imagination gone into this series. Cole writes with crisp prose and a good balance of militaristic slang (you might need to read the glossary to get a hang of all the acronyms). He's created a solid cast of characters and a massive canvas for them to skirmish, scramble and scuffle across. Can't wait to see what the next weird psy ability is going to be...
Recommend you read the first book before this one. You could start here, but it'll make more sense with all the background info.

8/10