Ragnarok

Patrick Vanner
ISBN:  1439133840
Rating: Buy, Paperback, New

I've been migrating to ebooks and  Mrs. Bugbear is very pleased with my migration  since the new house really doesn't have enough space for my current collection of books.  Thus far I have about 475 books on my e-reader.  Due to the low cost of Baen Webscriptions I've started to simply purchase the monthly offerings and I received Ragnarok as part of a Webscription purchase.

As a marketing tool the Webscriptions are pure genius, I get one or two books a month I want and three or four books that are just there.  Ragnarok was one of those books.  Patrick Vanner's follow-up book in the Xan-Sskarn war will be part of the 1-2 books I want when it's released.

Ragnarok is the opening salvo in war between the titular Xan-Sskarn and humanity, and humanity is getting the fecally smeared end of the twig.  Captain Alexandra McLaughlin epitomizes the expression that once is chance,  twice is coincidence and three times enemy action.

Overall the book is fairly well written, the only problem I had was that I really didn't get into the book until I was nearly half-way through it.  Part of that may have been reading Ragnarok coincided with deer hunting but part of it was too much action and not enough character development.  The former is more a feature than a problem and the second really gets remedied by the end of the book.  Most of the main characters have PTSD by the book's ending.

I enjoyed the book and I'm looking forward to the next installment.  Fans of John Ringo's Paladin of the Shadows may notice a similarity between the author's name and a character in Ringo's POS series.  Don't worry there aren't any sex scenes in Mr. Vanner's Ragnarok.

Read Ragnarok, an excellent first book by new author Patrick Vanner!