Overkill
Robert Buettner
Baen Books
Mass market paperback $7.99
ebook $6.99

It’s been a while since I’ve read a Baen title, and I’d forgotten how much fun they could be.  Baen has a large number of series books, and I wanted to start with a series that didn’t have a dozen or more novels in it.  So I chose Overkill, not realizing that it’s the first volume in a new series that’s a sequel to another series from a different publisher.  (Looks like I’ve got some catching up to do.)

Jazen Parker has been hired to help a wealthy businessman hunt a creature called the grezzen that’s reputed to be the most dangerous animal in the universe.  He’s got a gorgeous guide to help, which is about the only plus to the situation.

Parker comes from a world where his very existence is illegal, since his birth wasn’t authorized.  Simply existing is a capital crime.  He’s been hiding from bounty hunters since the day he was born.  He knows nothing about his parents.  In order to keep him alive the midwife who raised him enlists him in the Legion, a group of government sanctioned mercenaries.

When a person’s term of service in the Legion is up, they have one year of amnesty before they can be pursued for any crimes they’ve committed.  Parker’s year is almost up.  He’s only got a few weeks to establish a new identity.  If he doesn’t, he’s bounty hunter bait.  He needs the paycheck from this job to pay for that kind of fresh start.  Until he gets paid and establishes his new identity, he’s got to keep his secret.

But Parker isn’t the only one with a secret.  His employer has one.  The guide his employer hired has one.  And the grezzen may have the biggest one of all.

Overkill started out as an exotic planet safari story but soon transformed into something else.  Parker is a sympathetic character who is in a very bad spot due to no fault of his own.  That doesn’t stop him from making some bad choices at times.

The grezzen is a bit over the top; I guess you could say that Buettner engaged in a little overkill of his own.  Still, I liked the grezzen more and more as the story went on.  Buettner took what could have been a cliched alien and did something fresh with it.

The action scenes, and there are quite a few, never drag.  Overkill has 99 chapters, most of them only a page or three, making this a great book to read while standing in line at the grocery store.

The only thing that threw me was that the story takes place about a century in the future, but there are a number of worlds with large human populations, Parker’s home planet being quite overpopulated.  At first I didn’t buy this, but as I neared the end of the book, Buettner dropped enough information in passing for me to realize there is a logical explanation and that I’ve got read the earlier books (because the hints about that explanation sound really intriguing).  Don’t let the fact that this book builds on an earlier series stop you from reading it.  This is a self-contained story that stands on its own.

There are two sequels to Overkill, the most recent having been released a few months ago.  I’ll be reading them.