Pros
- Engaging story of twists and turns
- Fun action and self-contained story
Cons
- No overarching antagonist that stretches across books
Soldier of Fortune Review
Soldier of Fortune by T. R. Harris entertains readers with another mission undertaken by Adam Cain, otherwise simply known as The Human.
The elements of the writing that made the first book, Human for Hire, enjoyable are still here in this second book of the series. Adam continues with this tradition of losing his ship—or rather, his company’s ship that is on loan to him—much to the delight of readers. With that tradition now firmly established, one wonders how Adam will lose his ship next. And how he might recover it without incurring the wrath of his boss.
In this story, Cain takes on a bounty or warrant that is beyond his specific area of expertise: tracking down a high bounty and negotiating the return of stolen funds. Cain’s usual missions, if the first book is anything to go by, usually take the form of returning a target, dead or alive, for a bounty.
But Adam’s blunders in the previous story only motivate him to double down on an even larger bounty in order to wipe his slate clean and perhaps get a little ahead with his credits. Taking on this bounty leads Adam to join a specialist team of bounty hunters who specialize in negotiation.
The mission, of course, doesn’t go as planned, and Adam finds himself in yet another conundrum where he needs some help, which arrives in the form of a surprising character.
The plot itself is engaging and action scenes are enjoyable. There’s a lot to like about the fighting scenes since the scenes generally pit a physically inferior human against a more imposing alien. Despite the sometimes unequal matchup, Adam generally tends to win, with his victories generally attributed to a physique made possible by Earth’s higher-than-galactic-normal gravity.
There are many twists and turns, but the author provides enough clues so that the twists aren’t completely surprising.
One tiny drawback to a more episodic approach to a series is the lack of an overarching plot—there’s no villain who transcends the books and linking one story to the next. What connection readers do have is Adam’s firm, but as the two books have alluded to thus far, this connection seems tenuous at best.
Soldier of Fortune by T. R. Harris is another fun story in the Human for Hire series that finds Adam Cain struggling from one job to the next in order to eke out a comfortable living in a chaotic galaxy absent of rule of law.
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