The Clone Assassin review

This week I decided to review The Clone Assassin by Steven L. Kent. The book opens with a trio of devastating strikes against the Enlisted Man’s Empire, a government formed by the clone soldiers of the Unified Authority which had ruled human space, after they revolted against the Authority which had exiled them to cover its own failings in the face of an alien attack which destroyed over 90 percent of the human settled worlds. These are shortly followed by an attack on Wayson Harris, the main character of the series and one of the leaders of the clones. The first part of the book is focused on efforts to recover from the attacks and discover the fate of Harris. Later parts expand to include a urban battle in Washington DC, a rescue mission for an ally of Harris who had encountered Authority forces while investigating the attack on Harris which itself turns into a full scale battle, and a one man mission into one of the Authority’s command centers.

I give the book a 6.5 out of 10. Most of the battle scenes are entertaining but some aspects stretch believability even in a fictional setting like aerial gunships that take a hundred rockets from the same basic technology base to bring down.  Also while some of the plot twists are entertaining there is a major one which I feel was revealed far too early. I’ve re-read that part of the book four times and still don’t see how revealing the twist at the point in the story where it's exposed adds anything to the story. In fact, the twist doesn't really have any noticeable impact I can see on the story until the last few pages of the book and I feel saving it until then would have made the ending of the novel much more surprising.