Monday, April 25, 2011

Dragon and Liberator (Timothy Zahn)

Dragon and Liberator
(The Dragonback Adventures, Book 6)
Timothy Zahn
Starscape
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)


DESCRIPTION: Time is nearly up. The boy thief Jack Morgan and Draycos, his symbiotic K'da poet-warrior companion, have scoured Orion's arm, scrambling for clues as to who attacked Draycos's ship with a devastating weapon - known only as the Death - that shouldn't even exist in this part of the galaxy... an enemy intent on wiping out the K'da species as soon as the last survivors of their decimated population emerge from hyperspace. The trail has led them to the boardroom of the Braxton Universis megacorporation, through the cold-blooded world of interstellar mercenaries, along a tangle of traitors and dead-ends, and ultimately to the feet of a trio of conspirators willing to endanger the entire population of the Orion's Arm, not just the K'da. Draycos and Jack may know who their enemy is, but they don't know where they will strike, let alone how to stop them. Destroying the Death will take every trick Jack knows, every drop of courage in Draycos's black blood... and, possibly, their own lives.

REVIEW: No book reviews for a month, then two in one day... let's just say I'm trying to make up for lost time..
An action-packed conclusion to a fast-paced series, Zahn brings all the tangled threads together into one grand finale. At times, those threads trip each other up, with enough double- and triple-crosses to make one's head spin, but for the most part the pace clicks along much as it has throughout the Dragonback series. What cost it a half-star in the ratings was the overlong wrap-up, some of which feels more like information dropped out of the sky by an author in a hurry than a genuine plot revelation. I also felt that some of the enemies were left too one-dimensional, even for a Young Adult title. In the end, I was reasonably satisfied.

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