This book is a prequal. It tells the story of how Marcus was/why was court-martialed. It has Traviss' typical character development skills at work. Overall I enjoyed it but it contained slightly less action than normal. The author was also contrained by the timeframe she had to place the story in so the characters could only progress and mature so much because this story had to fit inbetween two others. The prison life part was ok, it seemed to be lacking something. Maybe because most of the book was people observing the main character and their thoughts and reactions to him and the narrative was never from his inner perspective. This fragmented the prison part as we had perspective from two main people that were not fully developed tell the prison portion of the story.

Overall well done. ( )