The Relentless Legion
The Divide series, Book 1
J. S. Dewes
Tor
Fiction, Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: Once, Adequin Rake thought the greatest threat to humanity was the collapse of the known universe beyond the frontier of the Divide. Now, a greater threat might lie within the Core worlds, embodied in the megalomaniacal monarch Augustus Mercer. His increasingly fanatical attempts to purge humanity of the alien mutagen unleashed generations ago by the (mostly) vanished Viators have led to the creation of a bioweapon that will kill anyone bearing any trace of genetic contamination - a death toll that could eliminate over half the population, followed by equally monstrous projects to rebuild the species to Mercer's own vision of purity. With the exiled Sentinels and her trusted crew and allies, including Mercer's estranged grandson/failed clone Cavalon, the smuggler Corsairs, and the secret Viator tech in her upgraded atlas navigation system, Rake races to get ahead of Mercer's plot and engineer a cure for the mutagen... and, hopefully, rescue crewmate Jackin from their enemy's clutches before it's too late for his sanity, or his life.
REVIEW: I enjoyed the previous two installments of the Divide trilogy, but for some reason I didn't quite engage with this final(?) volume. Maybe it's just been too long since I read the others. Or maybe it was a vague sense that, for all the sometimes-breakneck action and plot twists and betrayals and revelations, it sometimes felt like it was trying too hard to pack in emotional gut-punches and surprises.
It picks up with little lag time, with Rake, Cavalon, and the captive Jackin all up to their necks (and over their heads) in the general chaos of both protecting the galaxy from the oncoming collapse of the known universe and keeping humans from finishing what the Viators started and exterminating themselves, this time under the increasingly powerful grip of Augustus Mercer and his eugenics-driven vision for the future... all while further burdened by emotional and physical scars from previous battles and failures and lives that went to Hell long before the current problems and secrets were dropped on their shoulders. That's an awful lot of plates to keep spinning, and more than once I felt attention whiplash as the story moved from one plate to another, from one frying pan to another fire. The many threads and threats from the previous installments are given little to no recap for the reader coming into things after a break, and it took me some time to settle back into something like a groove... and even then, I often felt like I was a few steps behind the plot as it raced ahead. Maybe that's why a few twists and events felt like they arrived out of nowhere to either complicate problems or offer a solution (and/or deliver fresh psychological wounds to further complicate character interactions). It builds up to a suitably explosive finale, one with some hooks left dangling for continuations (I'm reasonably certain this is just intended to be a trilogy, but it wouldn't be the first time a "trilogy" generated more volumes) but which wraps up most of the main issues and sets surviving characters on new trajectories, having grown and changed significantly since the reader first met them.
While there was a fair bit to enjoy and the story could never be said to lag, I just kept feeling that, for all the racing I did to keep up and re-immerse in the series and keep up with the many characters and plot threads whipping past, I never quite caught up as the story kept sprinting ahead of me, leading to a slight dip in the rating.
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