Review: Strange Company

Strange Company by Nick Cole
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a 3-star review. It is closer to 3.5 stars, but I couldn't round it up.

I have become a big fan of Nick Cole's work as a solo author. He writes convincing characters and compelling action sequences. Those skills are widely present in this book. The back half of the book as our heroes fought a series of running gun battles was engaging and almost captivating.

However....spoilers lie ahead

Our heroes are a company of private military contractors. They fight for the highest bidder. We are reminded that they are tough PMCs. Over and over and over and over and...you get the point...again. Just as the story gets going, we dive into a digression meant to illustrate how badass our guys happen to be.

Far too frequently, a digression will fall into a sub-digression. By the time I was done with all the sub-digressions so the digression could conclude, I was bored. A bored reader-Dann is never a good thing. It leads to nitpicking story elements that don't make much sense.

For example, the titular Strange Company has a platoon of officers that have "abilities". One such ability is to summon a deadly warrior from another time/dimension. Another is the ability to cause others to have visions. All/most of these special operatives were developed in government laboratories from which they have escaped. I'm not a big fan of cosmic weirdness mixed in with my MilSF. That seems to be a trend these days, much to my chagrin.

But these are the only such special operatives that we meet in the book. The government sends down all manner of death and destruction, but it never sends anyone with "abilities" beyond the usual skills needed to shoot a weapon or physically dominate an opponent. If these are the escapees, then there must be others still under government control.

Also, one of these special operatives seems to have a penchant for chemical warfare. In one of the digressions, we learn that he used a chemical weapon to wipe out everyone in a target area with a lethal chemical. In this book, he opts to go with pumping the area full of some LSD-ish chemical for which he has a counteragent available for the Strange Company to use. The counteragent isn't exactly 100% effective. Erg.

One of our protagonists ends up being a traitor to the government. She has this grenade that destroys everything at the molecular level over a very large area. Large enough that you could not possibly hope to throw it and survive the aftereffects. Our heroes come up with a delivery vehicle that eliminates the need to throw the grenade. The story is consistent as another such opportunity never presents itself.

But here is the question. Why would such a weapon exist as something that gets thrown in the first place? If you need distance to survive, then it ought to be part of a rocket or mortar or another ranged weapon system.

Not last and not least, there were the apes.

Our heroes end up exploring a supposedly wrecked advanced spaceship that had crash-landed on the planet Crash. They find an array of simians living in the area. We find out that these apes are part of a future species that wipes out humanity. They have errantly traveled back in time and crashed on the planet. The site of the crash is in the middle of a huge desert that was created by the crash. So no real food and no real water.

But these apes have been here for hundreds (thousands?) of years guarding the crash site.

Also, as they are supposed to be technologically superior, you would have thought that they would have built new starships or at least a city or something else of note. Nope. They run around acting like ordinary earth apes that have learned to speak. Think "Planet of the Apes".

The combination of the front half of the story containing too many digressions that slow down the pace, and later elements that make little sense took this book down a level for me.


I have book 2 as the first two were a set. I'm not sure if I will ever get to book 2. Having had a very positive track record of reading Nick's other solo works, I was hopeful for this time around.

The serial digressions coupled with the "hey wouldn't be cool if this happened" elements made this a less enjoyable experience for me.

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