I was drawn to this book by the intriguing premise and cool cover. Would my hunch pay off?
A daring hostage rescue leads to the discovery of an imminent terrorist attack. Thanks to the Outriders, thousands of lives are saved. Until they aren’t. Despite the intelligence and the warnings provided by the unit, the terrorist attack goes off unhindered. A dangerously cunning woman who most assuredly should be dead has seemingly returned. And her plans aren’t just devastating, they might be unstoppable. How do you defeat a hidden enemy when you can’t let them know they’ve been discovered? You send in the Outriders.
This is a future world where Mars has been colonised and Humanity travels among the stars with all sorts of cool gadgets Batman would kill Robin for. Lincoln is headhunted to lead a small elite group called the Outriders, who specialise in black ops, mission-impossible style assignments.
It is always something of a challenge to successfully begin a military science fiction adventure – obviously the scene setting needs to be thoroughly covered before everything kicks off. But wading through several pages of information right at the beginning of a book generally has me tossing it back onto the pile. Life is too short to tolerate a book – I need to at the very least like it, preferably love it… However, Posey surmounts this problem with the kind of ease that tells me he’s no debut author. There is a chilling opening chapter involving Lincoln. And I was hooked.
From then on, the pace doesn’t let up. I quickly bonded with the small group, so that when they set out on their first mission together, I was feeling nervous… That doesn’t happen all that often these days, but I really love it when it does.
You’ll be unsurprised to learn that it doesn’t go according to plan. There are a series of nasty surprises for our intrepid Outriders. In addition we are in the viewpoint of several of the villains and I was delighted to see that we get more than a hint of why The Woman is so implacably opposed to our heroes.
The villains are far more than mere cardboard baddies – they have plans and objectives beyond the mission and hopes for the future. I really enjoyed that. I can imagine at least some of these folk will re-emerge in future books. Meanwhile the current adventure zipped along at a cracking pace with plenty of tension and finished unexpectedly. The ending tied up most of the loose ends, leaving a couple of plotpoints dangling for the next book. Which I will be acquiring one way, or another.
The ebook arc copy of Outrider was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest opinion of the book
9/10
Brainfluff 