Dietz’s new book furthers along his Legion of the Damned series about our favorite type of military unit: the unit that’s expendable, unorthodox, and resourceful, the one that gets sent unofficially to accomplish the impossible, whose soldiers know that neither glory nor recompense await them if they survive, and the politicians will piss away any advantage they manage to buy with their blood. But that’s better than

taking orders from yahoos and having to say “Yes, Sir!” “No, Sir!” “Oh, Sir!” and “Please, Sir!” This time Antonio Santana and his team have to rescue the President of the Confederacy himself, who has been captured by Ramanthians in the ongoing galactic war. The Ramanthians don’t know he’s the president, and he wants to preserve his anonymity to deprive them of leverage. So along with the “lucky” thousands who weren’t killed in the attack or the subsequent purges, President Namkool is sent to a hard labor prison planet. His bodyguard, Christine Vanderveen, happens to be Santana’s former girlfriend, so Santana has a strong personal motivation for winning this one. The major obstacle to this mission is that, oddly enough, the Vice President seems less than anxious to recover the man who sits in the big seat and calls the shots.

I have a lot or respect for Dietz; he was active duty himself as a medic with the Navy and the Marines, so he knows whereof he writes. I can see this as a book to have a strong following with the fellowship of active duty and prior service personnel. From a sheerly literary point of view, I found the writing clunky; but I loved the chapter headings, a mixture of historical and novel quotations that set the tone for the action that follows. – Chris Paige