Book Review - In Her Name: From Chaos Born by Michael R Hicks

This is the seventh book in the In Her Name series from Mr Hicks and when you think he must surely be running out of ideas he comes back just as strong as before.

In the previous books we discovered that the Kreelan were a female warrior race mysteriously linked through a mystical connection to their Empress and in some cases to each other.  We learned that they were a technologically advanced race, however when engaged in battle they only used technology that matched their opponents, in the later books that was us, the Human Race, but in the eyes of the Kreelan, we were nothing more than animals to be exterminated or culled as we did not have the ‘soul’ that they possessed.  Millions of people on hundreds of planets were annihilated before those wars came to an end with the ‘one’ who could save both races and so that should have been the end of it, sadly for us the followers of the In Her Name Series.

But, sneaky Mr Hicks had other plans, thank goodness.  He has sat down at his PC/Mac or whatever he uses to write his books and in between fighting for control of the keyboard with his cats he has written a book that goes back in time on the Kreelan Home world.  Hundreds of thousands of years, when humanity were still existing in caves, the Kreelans had existed and reached out to the cosmos.

We knew that all Kreelan Warriors were female and Hicks did inform us in one of the novels how this came about at the time that it did, but what we didn’t know was how the Kreelans got to that point, and the epic tale that led up to the point of becoming a Female dominated race.

Many authors, having six best sellers on their hands, would probably leave it at that, but luckily for us, Hicks has found his feet as a full time author and so, having nothing better to do with his time, has decided that we should learn just where and how the Kreelans evolved into what became humanities worst nightmare (but from a readers perspective a thoroughly engaging species).

From Chaos Born, begins to explain this to us and Hicks’s imagination and creativity is once again spinning a web of Love, Honour, Duplicity, Intrigue and War.  Instead of killing other humanoids, they are killing each other in single combat but as is usual for an In Her Name novel, also in graphically depicted and detailed battle scenes.

We know from our previous sorties into his stories, that there are mystical priestesses who guard and protect ‘The Way’  for the Empress and these Priestesses come from ‘holly’ orders that are as old as the Kreelan peoples  but that only a few of them exist in the later books.  Again, Hicks is beginning to tell us about the Seven Orders that existed and of the Priests and Priestesses.

The male warriors that coexisted and fought alongside their Consorts, it’s all there and more and it reads so easily that you once again get caught up in all of it you end up losing losing track of time.

In Her Name: From Chaos Born charts the birth of a new child, a child so different that a Queen needs to kill her.  A child so different that a priest defies, threats of a fate worse than death itself from his own kind , his High Priestess, and literally takes that one step over the threshold of the shrine, to lift the child from the safety of its dying mother’s arms.

In Her Name: From Chaos Born shows the Loyalty, Love and Savagery of Warriors who throw themselves into the path of death, to save a child who has been born different.....

And then that bugger Hicks does it again...... leaves us waiting for the next instalment There are some people you just want to slap and he is hitting the top of my list for this, not to hard of course just enough to say WRITE THE DAMMED BOOKS AND PUBLISH THEM SO WE CAN GET ON WITH IT

YES , THEY ARE THAT GOOD, ONCE YOU START READING THEM YOU WILL NOT WANT TO PUT THEM DOWN.

If you haven’t read any of his books, this is the order of the In Her Name Series they are worth the effort and once you start reading it takes effort to put them down

Book 1 - EMPIRE
Book 2 - CONFEDERATION
Book 3 - FINAL BATTLE
Book 4 - FIRST CONTACT
Book 5 - LEGEND OF THE SWORD
Book 6 - DEAD SOUL
Book 7 - FROM CHAOS BORN

and if you head over to Mr Hicks web page here you will be able to nab a free copy of Empire to get you started 

The pages for Hicks Books on Amazon US is here

and Amazon UK is here 

My only criticism is on the Cover Art - Just didn't like it, but hey it's nice to know he isn't perfect 

Ratings:

Editing for Kindle: 5 out of 5
Reading Enjoyment: 5 out of 5
Plot: 5 out of 5
Overall Rating: 5 out of 5