Review: Aftershocks (The Palladium Wars) by Marko Kloos

Aftershocks (The Palladium Wars) by Marko Kloos
My Rating: 4 of 5 stars
To Be Published: July 1, 2019


Huge thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Five years after the end of a system-wide intergalactic war, civilians and former combatants are desperately trying to pick up the pieces of their lives, just as a new threat emerges from the shadows. (Well, it doesn’t really emerge. By the end of the book, the threat remains firmly ensconced in the shadows, which as a reader, I found somewhat problematic.)

This is a difficult book to rate properly, because it didn’t really feel like Book 1 in a series. It read more like a prologue to Book 1: it introduced the characters, fleshed out the worldbuilding, introduced some hints toward the overarching plotline, then . . . ta-da, The End.

Which is not to say it was bad. Far from it! This was my first Marko Kloos book, and it won’t be the last. (Which, as a reader, is probably the highest praise I can give.) The prose is clean, fresh, and perfectly styled; the work flowed effortlessly, in that particular manner that only truly talented authors can manage. The story has enough potential that I very much want to read the rest of the series.

Had I been able to go straight from this to Book 2/3/whatever, I might not necessarily have found the lack of plot resolution so jarring. (Also, two of the POVs wouldn’t have felt quite so , , , bare bones.) As it was, I read to the end, then I wanted to double-check to see if my e-ARC file was corrupted. The book does not end on what feels like a full-book storyline. It’s the sort of ending that has you expecting to turn the page and see “Chapter 1”.

Recommended, but be aware: very much the first part of a series, even more so than readers accustomed to reading series might expect.