Just Finished Reading: Valentine's Resolve by E E Knight

In 2075 Earth is under new management. For over 50 years the alien Kurians have ruled with an iron fist and an insatiable lust for blood. They are effectively immortal, living in high places around the world they send out their Reapers to gather the life force of their human subjects to enhance their own. But for years now a human resistance has been growing. Winning small victories here and there they finally seem to be turning the tide. With the aid of Lifeweavers, who have enhanced the innate capabilities of some humans such as Valentine himself, they have taken the fight to the hated enemy.

But now Valentine is on his own. Abandoned by Southern Command he pursues his own agenda striking at Quislings working for the Kurian Order. However, when he is apparently captured by a special unit he thinks his days are finally numbered. But it is not to be. The ‘unit’ is made of serving Southern Command soldiers who offer him reinstatement if he accepts a covert mission from them: Travel to Seattle where a new force is successfully pushing back the territorial ambitions of one of the worlds most feared Kurians. Valentine’s mission is to join this new army and to discover its secret and to confirm the existence of a Lifeweaver amongst them – possibly the last of its breed. But as usual in a world turned upside down not everything is exactly like it seems.

This is a welcome return to form after the disappointing Valentine’s Exile. I suppose that after 6 books in a series it’s difficult to maintain the required focus and forward momentum. But the lacklustre Exile seems to have been a wobble (or quite possibly the fact that I wasn’t really in the mood at that time for another Vampire Earth novel). I found Resolve to be a more tightly scripted affair than its predecessor which certainly helped. The format (or formula) was a familiar one. We didn’t learn a whole lot more about the new world – except regarding Kurian death games and in-fighting and the rather surprising remnant of human government living deep undergrownd. We were presented with a few more mysteries regarding the apparent demise of the Lifeweavers (which I suspect are simply a different faction of Kurian) and interesting hints that the invasion of Earth was part of a much larger attack on other now Kurian occupied worlds – which of course opens up literally whole other worlds of possibilities. There are also hints of a reuniting of Valentine with his alien side-kick who apparently died in a previous novel. These things are never exactly great works of literature and should never be viewed as such. This was however an entertaining enough novel to keep me interesting in the next volume and, probably, the next 2-3 after that. Reasonable.