James Review -- Destroyermen: Devil’s Due

This week I decided to review Destroyermen: Devil’s Due by Taylor Anderson. 

The story has multiple plots within it, The primary plot focuses on the Grand Alliance’s efforts to defeat expatriate Japanese General Hisashi Kurokawa who has recently seized a number of high-ranking Alliance prisoners,including the pregnant wife of Alliance military Commander in Chief Matthew Reddy. However, Kurokawa has also gained control of the League of Tripoli battleship Savoie which badly outclasses anything in the Alliance fleet. And to make a bad situation even worse, aerial reconnaissance missions soon reveal that Kurokawa has obtained a number of League fighter craft which equal or outclass the few P-40 Warhawks still possessed by the Alliance. With time becoming critical, the USS Walker launches a desperate gambit along with much of the Alliance navy to defeat the Savoie, while a small commando unit launches an attempt to rescue Kurokawa’s prisoners…

One of the subplots follows a Grand Alliance army pursuing a defeated Holy Dominion force. But the allied army soon finds unpleasant surprises after the commander of the Dominion force is replace by an unknown and far more dangerous commander. Another follows the Alliance sailing frigate USS Donaghey on its continuing mission of exploration as well as battles against both Holy Dominion and League of Tripoli warships.

I give this book 9.5 out of 10. I love the variety of battle scenes in the story. Also, I like the characters in the various plots, and I found the sequences where characters are thinking to themselves fascinating, especially the later ones from Kurokawa’s viewpoint. And there’s just enough humor to keep the story from being too dark for my tastes. Really, the only thing I wish could have changed is expanding some of the scenes and adding a few more scenes in the Donaghey plotline.