A start of a new Cobra trilogy. However, it doesn't start very promising in my opinion.

In the other cobra books, Zahn starts each new story with a new generation and doesn't include the old generation very much at all. A clean break. It worked well.

He doesn't do that here. Jin Moreau Broom gets a message for help from Qasam and it turns out another Troft Demesne is taking it over to kidnap all the spine leopards to let loose on the main Cobra World to distract the Cobra's while they take over the Cobra Worlds. It deals with Jin, some of her children and a bunch of Cobra-wannabe Qasamans.

Zahn focuses more on the Qasamam cobras" than on the real ones. And the whole Qasaman paranoia thing wore thin. Let the Cobra's kick Troft butt. And that just wasn't what was happening.

Given this is a trilogy, the storyline is going to be stretched out, but still, this opening felt weak compared to the first 2 cobra books. Of course, time and memory might be biasing me against it." ( )

Slam-bang sf-mil-fic with the bionic warrior Cobras, a little older and wiser, and with the second generation enrolled. Lots of duplicity and plot twists. Just ignore the fact that their implanted weapons are physically impossible: it's a comic book. ( )

280 pages . Get this one from your library. The story is mildly interesting.Its a basic military SF book. The dialog is wooden. There is an OK storyline that sucked me in. I wish Zahn had done a better job of character development. The Qasama maybe stand ins for an Arab culture. are characterized as being paranoid and double dealing. The Cobra's technologically enhanced humans have are noble. The Troft's are the stock aliens. ( )

Kind of disappointing considering I almost died to obtain this book. It's not quite as good as Zahn's Star Wars books or the Conqueror's series. It would probably help if you read the Cobra trilogy before this, except those books went out of print about 20 years ago. I had read the last two of that trilogy, though about 3 years ago so I wasn't all that up on who some of these characters were and what had gone on before. Considering how long it's been, maybe the publisher should have included a summary or something. ( )

This book was over before I realized it! Not very often that I get so caught up in a story that I don't realize it's about to end until it does, or that I don't get distracted and put it aside for a couple days while I read something else.

It is a military science fiction book - but not so military-based that you're getting descriptions of bullet types and thickness of armor, and not so science fiction that people can walk through walls or be beamed to outer space on command. Some of the aliens are humans (and some of the humans are alien) and all of the social issues are ones you'll recognize. And the solutions to the problems in the story require that people overcome their biases and work together - so it's not really that "far-out-there".

I like how the characters are so smoothly written that they feel like real people, with real issues, and real lives. And the aliens and alien (to us) technology is added in as if it is a perfectly normal progression of where we are today... without a lot of lecturing or boring techy-jargon. And, while there is some social justice message in here, it is not preachy at all.

I don't have the next book in the series, but plan to get it now - this one ended without a complete resolution and I want to find out how the Cobras overcome their enemy. ( )