"Archangel" by Margaret Fortune Book Review

Archangel ’s book description contains a major spoiler for the first book of the series, Nova . So if you haven’t read that yet, I urge you to hop over to my review of Nova right now. Otherwise,  you’ll run into all the spoilers for book one.

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(No spoilers for Archangel , though. Promise!)

An enemy you can’t kill. A soldier who can’t fight. An interstellar war that can’t be won...until now.

As a soldier of the Celestial Expanse, Guardian First Class Michael Sorenson knows better than anyone that when the Spectres invade, there are only two options: run or die. However, his defensive war takes on a whole new spin when he’s recruited into Division 7, a Research & Development facility with the ultimate mission: to create a large-scale weapon that can kill Spectres en masse.

Here Michael joins a team of military elite who have the daring—and dangerous—task of taking new weapons prototypes out into the field for testing on enemy troops. Yet the closer they come to developing a working WMD, the more it becomes clear: there’s a saboteur in R&D.

With all signs pointing to a massive Spectre attack brewing on the horizon, the creation of a new weapons system yields an opportunity to end the threat once and for all. As the days count down toward its launch, Michael must hunt down the saboteur...before the saboteur hunts down him.

Dun dun DUUUUUUUUUUH.

Spectres, if you’ll recall, are ghost-like aliens who invade people’s minds and slowly kill them over the course of three years, then hop over to the next person. Rinse, wash, repeat.

After Lia, the love of his life, went nova, blowing herself and several hundred spectres to kingdom come, Michael joins the military. It’s your classic I’m-going-to-enlist-to-run-from-my-problems scenario, with varying levels of success. He’s also pissed at his sister Teal, because she let Lia go nova, so she doesn’t appear in the story at all.

That is the only negative thing I have to say about this book, though Margaret Fortune did tell me (via Twitter) that the next installment of this five-book series will be from Teal’s point of view. Everything else about Archangel is just as good as Nova , and it is fascinating to see humanity’s reaction to the first alien species we’ve run into.

I was skeptical as to whether or not Archangel could live up to its predecessor, now that the mystery behind Lia’s purpose and the spectres’ existence are out in the open. But Fortune still manages to create a heart-pounding mystery and plenty of questions. There are very few things in this book that I was able to foresee. (The entire R&D division is in a sky station floating over a planet full of spectres. What could possibly go wrong?)

And since she killed the main character in the last book, that makes Michael one of the rare main characters in fiction who is absolutely not safe . It makes things interesting, to say the least.

We also get to learn more about the history of Fortune’s intergalactic world and how humans got there, which is always fun.

One of the biggest things I appreciate about this book are the ethical questions Fortune poses. One of Michael’s fellow soldiers points out that what they’re trying to do--wipe spectres from the universe--is genocide. Granted, it’s technically in self-defense, as the spectres, left unchecked, would annihilate the human race completely. Whether or not that’s a justifiable excuse is primarily left to the reader.

Fortune also introduces us to a brand new human villain--whose name I cannot mention because of spoilers--who is absolutely terrifying.

Needless to say, Archangel was a joy to read, with a shocking ending that rivals Nova ’s explosive one.