The Bottom Line: An electrifying blend of secrets, sabotage and survival that sets the stage for a promising series.
Sophie Allard’s life has been anything but easy. She was adopted from an orphanage at age 10, only to suffer her mother’s death at a local farmer’s market two years later. From then on, her adopted father, Professor Milo Anderson, distanced himself from her, seeming to bury himself in his career.
Now 24, Sophie is a cadet at the professor’s alma mater, Colorado’s prestigious Stockton Military Institute of Combat Aviation Training. Just one final flight away from being valedictorian and winning the Stockton Cup, one talented candidate stands in Sophie’s way – Parker Worthington, whose father is a general and former Stockton Cup winner himself. Shortly after saving Parker’s life after his aircraft crashes, the two bond over her selfless act and their strained relationships with their parents.
That’s when Sophie is hit with another bombshell: the professor died in a mysterious lab explosion. It’s merely the first of several shockers she’ll have to absorb over the course of the novel.
D.R. Berlin’s action thriller is filled with characters who have perfected the art of withholding information and outright deceit. It’s true even of the cadets, when after four years of grueling training, Sophie and Parker are only beginning to divulge what they know about their personal histories. The competition and camaraderie among the cadets, as well as the oppressive world rules by adults, feels similar to YA classics Divergent and The Hunger Games, although Berlin’s reality is decidedly far less dystopian.
Berlin’s formula, which is quite effective, is to bookend frequent rushes of adrenaline in the form of action scenes with increasingly large, jaw-dropping revelations, most of which have both real-world and personal ramifications.
It comes as a pleasant surprise that the book’s anchor character is Kai Lovac, a hitman hired by an organization known as the Third Estate. Lovac has become the best in the business despite operating with limited and sometimes deliberately false information. Like most fictional assassins, he’s successful in part because of his ability to suppress any emotional feelings about his work or his victims. But the more the book progresses, the more Lovac seeks the truth. The more enlightened Lovac becomes, the more the novel becomes a page-turner.
