DESCRIPTION:

 "For war hero Caitlin Taggart, mining work on the Moon is dirty, low pay, and high risk. But no risk seems too extreme if it helps her return to Earth and the daughter she loves more than life itself. Offered a dangerous, long-shot chance to realize that dream, Caitlin will gamble with more than just her life.

 

By leading a ragtag crew of miners on a perilous assignment to harvest an asteroid, Caitlin could earn a small fortune. More importantly, it would give her clearance to return to Earth.  But when an unexpected disaster strikes the mission, Caitlin is plunged into a race to save not only herself, but every human being on Earth."

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REVIEW:

 

Zero Limit is an entertaining, though not particularly original, space-disaster story.  The beginning starts slowly and contains too much info-dumping, the secondary characters came across as flat and things just worked out too conveniently.  But if you just want to be entertained then you might like this book.

 

 

 

 

 

I'm playing the Crime Scene card today for the most famous fictional black market in the world- The Hob in District 12.

 

(Read a book set in the future)

“Let me ask you. How do you think the situation looks?” (Alex) 

        “I’ll let you decide once I show you all the data,” Sara said. “But if I were you, I’d consider relocating.”

“To where, exactly?” (Alex) 

         “Start by leaving the planet and work your way out from there." (Sara)

 

That was one of the funnier dialogues from Zero Limit, well I thought it was funny. When I read it, it cracked me up! I could not stop laughing. : ) 

 

On to the review...

 

Zero Limit is about a a Moon-born woman named Caitlin Taggart that ended up  separated from her daughter when politicians on Earth restricted anyone born on the Moon to return back to Earth. She ends up obtaining a job on the Moon, leading a ragtag crew of miners while she's biding her time waiting for either a favorable legal outcome or a lift in the travel ban. Just when she's lost almost all hope in seeing her daughter again, a mining company big-wig, offers her a guaranteed return trip to Earth if her and her crew will complete one job for him- one very illegal and dangerous job. With no other options left and a "how hard can this be for the best miners on the moon" attitude, Caitlin and her crew accept the offer -- and not one, but many things, go very, very wrong...

 

 

Sounds good huh? It is, but when you first start reading the book, if you're like me, you'll find the story a little bit dull because there's quite a bit of 'telling' instead of 'showing.' As the story progresses and the action increases, I got further absorbed into the plot but the excitement level does fluctuate back in forth until they start "the job," then it increases a few notches. If you like space related stories and a strong-willed heroine, I would definitely give the story a try. The second half of the book, more then makes up for the slow start.

 

*I received this ARC from Goodreads FirstReads in exchange for an honest review. Thank you!

There's no other way to say this, but my second read of the SNAFU series as edited by Geoff Brown was very much a mixed bag. Thinking about my overall feelings, I kept coming back to the poem by Henry Longfellow, entitled When She Was Good:

And when she was good, she was very, very good,
But when she was bad she was horrid.

The collection starts out very, very impressively. S. D. Perry's Badlands is a fantastic Vietnam set tale of a squad of soldiers coming up against a bizarre, but extremely deadly, undead enemy. Perry wrote a number of my favourite Aliens tie-in novels from when I was a teen, and it was fantastic to see she has lost none of her skill as a writer. My other favourite story was the third, In Vaulted Halls Entombed by Alan Baxter, an excellent Lovecraftian spin on a group of soldiers in the very wrong place and not knowing when to call it a day.

And as much as there are a number of other decent tales - such as They Own the Night by B. Michael Radburn and After the Red Rain Fell by Matt Hilton - some of the others included too much pre-supposed knowledge for me to care overly much about proceedings. I speak specifically here of Cold War Gothic II: The Bohemian Grove by Weston Ochse and Show of Force by Jeremy Robinson & Kane Gilmour. Both were well-written but ultimately seemed strange inclusions for a collection that is meant to stand alone when their character building is extremely limited, since the reader is meant to have read the stories that came before the events that each depicted.

Those stories I have yet to mention did little for me. Either because their tone was too light or "out there" for my tastes, or because they were incredibly dull and had me wishing for them to end and end swiftly

So, as is the case with most collections, the highs and lows in SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest effectively cancel one another out, effectively rendering this one a straight down the line ...

3 Decisions to Defy Last Orders for SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest.

In this novel, Aaron “Woodshed” Wallace is a professional mixed martial arts fighter with a very shaky past. He’s rough around the edges and is the kind of person who only knows fighting, so he might as well get paid for it. He’s a club fighter operating in regional shows when promoter Eddie Banzai from the world’s largest fighting organization (this novel’s version of the UFC), offers him to fight one of their most prominent fighters on two days notice, who Woody incidentally had previously beaten, in the co-main-event of a Pay Per View card. After he signs a contract all hell breaks loose. He is out to dinner with Marcela, the cousin of his Brazilian training partners when an old friend whom Woody owes a big favor asks to back him up to a bookie he owes money to. Woody intervenes when the bookie’s henchman starts beating up his friend. This later leads to Marcela being kidnapped. Woody is told that he has to win the fight or bad things will happen to Marcela. The story then evolves into rival gangs, illegal pit fighting, and the Yakuza.

There is some good and bad and this novel. I enjoyed the training and the fight scenes. The author either has a background in mixed martial arts or has done a lot of research because this aspect of the book is very well done. The book is extremely fast paced and was a quick read, things that I appreciate it. The main characters, such as Woody, his training partners, and Marcela arr well done. The villain characters in this story, such as Eddie Banzai, Kendall, and Chops weren’t quite as well developed. My biggest issue centers about the believability aspects on certain plot points. The quandary that Woody gets himself could have been explained better and was hard to buy into. The way he gets himself out of it is also a stretch. The climax was hard to follow in spots and could have gone through a bit of rewrite for clarity. Overall, I find this to be an enjoyable read and would recommend it.

Carl Alves - author of Reconquest: Mother Earth