The Prison in Antares
Mike Resnick
Pyr Books
Paper, 287 p., $18.00/$19.00 CAN
ebook $11.99

I’d like to thank the good folks at Pyr Books for sending me the review copy of The Prison in Antares.  I think I enjoyed it more than its predecessor The Fortress in Orion.

The Dead Enders have barely recovered from their previous case when they’re called on to infiltrate a prison in the Transeki Coalition.  The Coalition has captured Edgar Nmumba.  Nmumba is the only person who knows how to counter the Q bomb, a devasting weapon that the Coalition has been using to wipe out entire planets.

The prison is two miles below the surface of a planet behind enemy lines.  Initially that’s all they know.  They’ve got to locate the planet, then the prison, figure out a way to get in, and either get Nmumba out or kill him if they can’t.  And they’ve got to do it before Nmumba breaks under interrogation.

This one was a little different.  In the previous book, all members of the team came home.  This time that’s not a guarantee.  This installment of the series is darker than I remember the previous installment being, and the problems to overcome are more challenging.  This is space opera for the thinking person.

In the previous book, they came up with a plan and worked it.  Without giving anything away, there’s this old saying about the best laid plans…

I really liked how things didn’t go well for the team at times.  It was clear that Resnick was having a great time writing this book because of all the creative things his characters had to do. Like I said in my review of The Fortress in Orion, this was a fun book.

Which is not to say it was a fluff book.  Resnick deals with some pretty serious themes in his work, and The Prison in Antares is no exception.  There are times when the Dead Enders kill innocent people to achieve their objective.  If they succeed, they may save billions of lives.  If they fail, then people will die.

Much of the book is dialogue, not detailed descriptions that go on for paragraphs.  As a result, the book is a quick, enjoyable read.  If you want to spend a few hours in a far future adventure, look no further than The Prison in Antares.