Review: A story that gives a different meaning to detente
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 26, 2013
As part of an advance team on the dessert planet of Horace Deuce-Niner, Sniper Sergeant Marc Staille and his trusty rifle Mat patiently lie in wait for any glimpse of the planet's inhabitants. Intel shows there are no civilized indigenous, just the tawnies, large hairy creatures with claws and razor sharp teeth that hunt in packs with highly developed attack skills. When Marc spots one, then another and another, he and Mat do what they do best, take them all out.Marc and Mat didn't get them all, and the biggest, baddest of them all Commander Hamm Orsonna is about to show them that not only does he possess highly developed attack skills but he has a hidden bio-weapon, his own pheromones. Easily overpowered and with no defense against Hamm's heady pheromones, Marc is taken prisoner.Prisoner and captor will soon find themselves caught up in a fight to not only achieve peace for Hamm's planet but to claim happiness for them both.What an interesting world author Rhi Etzweiler has given us, a planet inhabited by intelligent non-human beings who speak a language of grunts and growls and who use not only physical strength but smell and pheromones to fight with. A stark desolate planet so well described that I actually had to get a glass of water to sooth my parched throat. Full of interesting characters, human and non, the author manages to make them all come to life.Marc talks to Mat as if it were not a weapon but a lover; he is connected to it and feels bereft when separated. Like all snipers, he's a loner, able to spend hours at a time still and silent, one with his environment. He is a man of action and taken totally out of his element when he realizes what he thought were creatures are actually intelligent beings and that he is now on a diplomatic mission instead of search and destroy.Hamm is a good commander, those under his command are important to him and he will do whatever it takes to protect them. His species has a highly developed sense of smell and Marc not only smells of honesty but of nip as well. He will find himself torn between defending his prisoner and defending his comrades.We meet a number of Hamm and Marc's fellow soldiers but the two that stand out are Sergeant Dehna - a translator under Hamm's command and Reccin, Hamm's second in command. Though secondary characters, both were interesting in their own right and pivotal to the plot.This is a great action/sci-fi/romance story, yes I said romance. The romance brings in my one issue, while not the author's fault; every time I pictured Hamm in my mind he looked like Chewbacca. I just couldn't get around his and Marc's attraction. I tried making him the Beast in Beauty and the Beast, but Chewie he remained, and I just couldn't get my head around it. Chewie aside, I enjoyed this book.This story was so well written that I found myself forgetting I was in another time and place. This is an M/M romance but there really aren't that many actual sexual scenes in it and the few there are brief and not very explicit, just steamy. If the reader isn't careful, they may even learn a lesson in tolerance. They will most definitely get a good story told to them.Member of the Paranormal Romance Guild Dual Review Team