Reviewing Wraith Hand by Jonathan Moeller

Expanding the world and raising stakes

I recently read Jonathan Moeller’s Iron Hand after letting it sit on my Kindle for a couple of years. I liked it, but wasn’t amazed. I also had the second book in the adventures of Jack March, and just finished reading that.

To give the background of the world, Jack March is a high-level intelligence operative for the Kingdom of Calaskar, an interstellar kingdom at war with a race of cyborgs, the Final Consciousness (also known as the Machinists). In the previous story, he recovered a dangerous mind control device from them.

I wasn’t expecting this book to pick up quite so immediately from the last one. This starts with March on his way to deliver this device into the hands of the Calaskaran Navy so they can analyze it and hopefully learn how to guard against it.

When March’s ship arrives from hyperspace in the system where he’s supposed to do the handoff, however, he finds the Calaskaran capital ship he was supposed to meet falling to a massive assault from Machinist forces. He only has time to rescue a single escaping lifeboat before he has to flee the system with a damaged hyperdrive, and the Machinist forces are not just letting him walk away.

Worse yet, the only place he can reach with his damaged engine is a star system run by the Custodian, an AI created by a long-dead alien race. It’s not exactly hostile, but it’s not exactly safe or predictable either.

While on the Custodian’s space station, March must deal with (and cut deals with) two alien races, Machinist agents, beautiful women with unclear intentions, and the ever-present possibility of traitors among those working with him.

In the course of the story, he learns about himself, the origins of the Machinists, and an even graver threat that may destroy all of the sentient races.

I liked this book more than the first. It expands the world quite a bit, and opens up a lot of directions for the story to go. Iron Hand was relatively small scale, an intelligence operation in a backwater space station meets complications. Not bad, but simple and self-contained. This story introduces several new elements and a large scope for future action. It’s not just protagonist and adversary. It’s protagonist + adversary + multiple third parties with unclear agendas. It’s not just solve this immediate problem. Understanding the immediate problem reveals massive problems on the horizon which may destroy everything.

Iron Hand was setting the stage. Wraith Hand is setting a larger series in motion, and I’m curious where this is going. There are several more books to his Silent Order stories, and I definitely intend to keep following this.

Space opera meets James Bond and I think I may have heard Cthulhu somewhere off in the distance.

Yes, recommend.