Review of Eric S. Brown and Jessy Marie Robert’s Kinberra Down

Eric S. Brown and Jessy Marie Roberts have created a faced paced and slick little tale of war, aliens, and mayhem that is packed tightly into 80 pages that go by even quicker than you would think.  This novella starts out fast, with the Kinberra, a human warship, getting assaulted immediately after coming out of void space into a war zone.  Humans and Darians, a cat-like race, are fighting in the system, and before the Kinberra can get annihilated like the rest of their fleet, the ship takes a blind jump into void space…which sends them to a mysterious ice planet with some very dangerous indigenous life forms, where they are forced to crash land and make a desperate attempt to repair their vessel before they get annihilated by the giant ants that swarm the snow drenched planet.

This book barely gives you barely enough time to breath, as we get space battles, hand to hand combat, gruesome ant like enemies, mutiny, and even a bit of a love story jam packed into this very quick read.  I devoured this one in one quick sitting and enjoyed it a great deal.  This could easily be part of a much bigger saga of the war between the Humans and Darians, and we even get to meet a Darian that is a prisoner aboard the Kinberra, so the reader gets a taste of these enemies and how the fight.

My only real complaint has to be that this book is so brief that we don’t get too much of a chance to really get to know the people involved in this tale in any depth.  This is true in particular of Jordon, Rebecca, and Xar, the Darian prisoner who is forced to fight alongside the humans against the menacing ants.  I would have liked to seen more of them.  This is a brief jaunt into space that gives you action that is fast paced with absolutely no filler, though, which marks it as a blast in my book.

Kinberra Down can be found on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/161706016X/ref=cm_cr_thx_view