Reviews of The Phoenix Conspiracy

This is a grand space opera in the days of the Empire sometime between 'Star Wars' and 'Dune'. It is a tale of intrigue, plots within plots and shifting alliances with tense and relatively realistic space battles, everything one could want in a space opera. But there's more, contagious werewolves and vampires, a secret meeting with a princess, collapsing stars and a resurgent terrorist organization that seems to know everyone's secrets. This is a mystery as much as a military adventure and one must pay attention to small clues as they come by. Some are meaningful in this volume, but some don't come to fruition until later volumes of the series.

The plot begins with a young captain of an Intelligence (not 'intelligent' but 'intelligence', as in spycraft) starship is tasked with finding and capturing the Empire's most powerful warship which has been commandeered by a rogue captain who has destroyed three freighters from a neighboring, non-human civilization. The main character is a rather rowdy, undisciplined guy who runs a loose but effective ship. He is given a straight-laced but beautiful woman from a different branch of the service as his second in command, one who just happens to a be a former lover of the rogue captain.

As they begin to track the rogue ship down, the captain comes to believe there is more to this than simply a rogue captain. Meetings with a crime boss, a werewolf and a band of terrorists convince him that there is more to it than that and he begins to try to get at the truth rather than single-mindedly pursue the missing ship. This puts him at odds with his straight-laced XO and in the conflict, she seduces him, leading to the only sexual episode in the story. From then on there is a struggle for control of the ship, as well as the struggle against the conspiracy which imperils the Empire.

The story seems to be all pure entertainment except for one small part where the XO ponders the idea that all the charming, good looking men are jerks and she wonders why. The answer is trivial, because they can be. Plain-looking men can't get away with it.

The proofreading is professional grade, as is the prose. The only down side, the story is not at all complete in this volume and the remaining books in the series are unreasonably priced at $8.99. That is a print-on-demand paperback price.

A very readable free offering. While I do not assign exceptional literary value to this effort, I found it fast moving, thus entertaining, and impressive in the apparent knowledge of military hardware displayed by the author.
Thank you Mr. Sanders