Review: I love this series!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 16, 2014
Sara King has such a gift for making her characters just so darn lovable.  This is the third in the Zero series, and now Joe Dobbs is finally getting his wish and returning to Earth after a very long time.  Of course it's not the Earth he left seventy-some turns ago(like a year), and Joe is nothing like the 14 year old boy Earth boy he was when he was 'drafted' into the Congressional army of worlds to fight their battles.Now Joe is a hero and bigger than life, but he must go back to Earth along with all other humans because scientists on Earth have spliced the DNA of psychics to create soldiers who can kill using only their minds.  Finding himself back on Earth is shocking for Joe.  While he's busy killing the tyrannosaurus rex-type aliens that have been set loose on Earth as punishment because of the traitorous scientists, Joe gets spit on by the local humans gone mad as all of their technology gets shut off.In this mad-max scenario, Joe runs into the 'new people', the enhanced humans who are as innocent as babes, but with the power to flatten mountains with only a thought.  Hardened by his long years of military service, Joe feels as if he's tainted and that these 'new people' deserve better, although Joe knows that the desperate and murderous human race will kill anything that looks like a good(yes, humans are reduced to cannibalism)so he sticks with the group to protect them.Sara King's characters are so real and so flawed that they actually transcend what it means to be human, and most of them are aliens.  Unlike the previous two Zero books in the series, this book deals only with humans and a man-eating dinosaurs, so King as a chance to really give us some insight into just exactly who and what humanity really is down deep.  Fear makes these humans do inhuman things to each other which felt real enough, and made me wonder how anyone but psychopaths could have ever survived the hard times in our history.Even today we see that being ruthless gives you a better chance of passing on your genes in a cruel world, so it begs the question, why are there any nice people at all?  I love when a writer has the skill to ask important questions without hitting the writer over the head with them.  King lets the characters react to the circumstances according to their inner character, with Joe Dobbs giving us an example of how integrity is respected everywhere no matter what the language barriers.I've also read the Moldy Dead which is a wonderful short book that fills in the story of Forgotten and his motivations in the second  book of the Zero series, and I'm working my way through everything Sara writes with great pleasure.