Shadow Warrior - by Chris Bunch

This is an omnibus edition of Bunch's three Shadow Warrior novels - The Wind After Time, Hunt The Heavens and The Darkness Of God, which is why it's taken me longer than usual to get through. It also contains a new Joshua Wolfe short story called Backblast. This is set between the end of the Al'ar war and the events in Shadow Warrior.

Joshua Wolfe grew up on an Al'ar world and was trained in their esoteric fighting arts, only to be taken prisoner when the war started. Once free, he operated as a special-forces expert during the war until, on the verge of defeat, the Al'ar inexplicably vanished from the galaxy.

Now Wolfe makes a living as a bounty hunter come mercenary and still occasionally works for the Federation. On the hunt for a thief, he comes into possession of a Lumina, one of the rare Al'ar power stones, which leads him into a much larger game of power politics, a hunt for the last Al'ar and the revelation of a much more dangerous threat to the entire universe.

I quite enjoyed this book. There's lots of action, a decent plot, a fair smattering of sex and a good deal of violence. A bit like a steamy spy-thriller in space, the pace never really lets up and it kept me reading into the small hours.

Genre: Action, Science-Fiction, Thriller.
ISBN:1-841-49332-5
My Rating: 7/10