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Review The Crider Chronicles

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Oct. 15, 2009 By dougappelt
"Exciting "One More Page" Adventure"
The mini-review: An excellent Sci-Fi book that sucks you in quickly and enthralls you with its "just one more page" excitement.

[T]he hovering ship spat out a jade-green bolt that
shot down the white guide beam and slammed into the
cabin, blasting it into splinters. Flaming wreckage fell
hundreds of meters away. Mike grabbed Jenny, pressing her
to the ground as the shock wave rolled the earth sickeningly
under them. In a moment of rage, Mike made the biggest
misjudgment of his life.
~page 99 of Book One of The Crider Chronicles



The verbose review:

With... More > an even mix of action, politics and humor, along with a little romance, Anderson Gentry sets us off on a journey into a possible future of man’s settlement of space, roughly two hundred years from now.

The Crider Chronicles is Volume One of a planned four volume set in the Galactic Confederation series. The first volume is broken up into three books, which could be summarized as: First Contact, Forming the Confederacy, and The Galactic War.

Book One sets the stage with the creation of a ‘Faster Than Light’ (FTL) engine called the Gellar Drive that enables humans to begin colonizing other worlds, and introduces our young hero Michael Crider as he departs his beloved Idaho mountains for a life as a hunter/pioneer on a newly colonized arboreal world. The author skillfully develops all the people we meet and fleshes out this new world with loving devotion to detail. Things heat up when the humans meet the militaristic race called the Grugell, who had thought themselves alone in the galaxy, much like the humans. Book One focuses on the ensuing conflict between the two races, with the focal point being poor Mike Crider’s new home.

The author’s personal experience with weapons, hunting and military tactics clearly shine throughout the entire volume, and I’m sure any readers with military and/or hunting experience will sagely nod their heads at certain points as they feel a twinge of familiarity with the action on the page. With strong, likeable characters, the reader forms an instant bond with the citizens of this distant frontier planet, and that bond draws them even deeper into the story sharing their joy and their sorrow as the conflict escalates.

Book Two jumps ahead twenty years after the conclusion of that first skirmish to find that twelve planets have now been colonized by humanity and that occasional attacks by the Grugell are still occurring. The book focuses on the first ‘Constitutional Convention’ you might say as the corporate governors of each world plus representatives from Earth gather to form the Confederated Free Planets. Here we see the author has a flair for romantic comedy along with hard-bitten politics. Throw in a little Tom Clancy-esque espionage and you’ve got a thrilling read about the birth of a nation.

Book Three again leaps into the future, passing on the heroics to the next generation of Criders, as the small skirmishes with the Grugell boil over into all out war. This book really dives into the ‘techno-thriller’ genre as we fight the war from four major viewpoints: the Senate floor, a Navy Task Group, a Privateer warship, and ground-based commandos. The action jumps furiously from ship to ship and planet to planet. The story wraps up nicely as a complete work, but with a few subtle hints of things to come in the second volume; a second volume that I am now eagerly looking forward to. < Less

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Product Details

Copyright Anderson Gentry & Double Dragon Publishing Inc. (Standard Copyright License)
Edition First Edition
Publisher Double Dragon Press
Published August 31, 2005
Language English
Pages 658
 
Binding Perfect-bound Paperback
Interior Ink Black & white
Dimensions (inches) 6.0 wide × 9.0 tall

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