Book Review: In Her Name: The First Empress Trilogy - 'Forged in Flame'

Look inside Amazon UK here
Look inside Amazon US here 

What can I say about Michael R Hicks and his 'In Her Name' books that I haven't said before.  The guy knows how to weave a story creating whole new worlds and people who live and die by a code of honour that is so savage that it takes your breath away, yet, at the same time they are a species endowed  with as much passion for love and life as they have for killing......

Hicks has clearly spent many hours in deep thought thinking about the characters of these books so that he can pass on a clear and descriptive narrative to us, the readers; introducing us to a new species on a new planet and he just isn't giving as a story he is giving us a living history of a species in meltdown over hundred's of thousands of years and then going back and telling us how it came to be.

This is the eight book in the In Her Name series by Hicks and his writing get's better with each book, that's not to say that the writing was in any way bad or poor in the previous books as all seven that came before, drew you in from the first page and you, at least I, didn't want to put the books down until I had devoured each story, and neither, I believe will you. When they ended I do believe that I suffered withdrawal symptoms and being an avid reader with lots of other books by other authors in my TBR pile, after reading a Hicks book you find it a wee while before you are ready to go elsewhere.

I am not going to spend any time on characters or back story in this review, as part of a series it will be meaningless to you and if you have read any of his books you will already be familiar with them.  What I can say is, if you haven't read any of these books and you are a fan of science fiction, war, and love with an anthropological study of a alien race from the beginnings of time when the Earth was still in a primordial pool and then bypassing us by before finding and killing us (and even when they are, you still can't help but like them!!!) then these books are for you.

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

Book 8 - FORGED IN FLAME

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 

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

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

In Her Name: - A Book Review

Indie Author Michael R Hicks, who goes by the Twitter name of @KreelanWarrior  published the latest instalment to his In Her Name Series of books on Monday 3rd October.  I immediately downloaded it from Amazon on to my Kindle at the amazing price of £2.21!!!!

This is a brand new book, number 6 in a series, and it is immediately on sale at the bargain basement price of £2.21.  The thing about that is, that while the price may be bargain basement, the story telling is anything but and indeed if you click on the link above to Michael Hicks site you can even get one of the books in the series free.  Daft or what, well no, not really.  I think Hicks knows exactly what he is doing, he also knows, without shouting it from the rooftops, that he is a skilled story teller, and that once you read one of the books in the series, he has you hooked like a master angler, who seems so effortlessly to catch his large fish and then begins to reel it in to it's eventual doom.  But, for the reader of an In Her Name book it is is not the doom of the fish that awaits you it is the surprise of finding a SyFy writer who weaves a seamless story of Love and War, Pathos and Humour and Space battles akin to the great Sea Battles of our History.

In her Name was released in the same way as the Star Wars film genre with the up to date (in terms of the future setting) books of:

Empire 

Confederation 

Final Battle

and then, like Lucas, he wrote and released three further books telling us how humanity, who had been colonising space for hundreds of years but had never discovered any alien life, stumbled across the one Alien life force that they would die regretting the meeting, and not understanding, WHY!

These books are:

First Contact

Legend of the Sword

Dead Soul 

If you have never read a science fiction novel in your life YOU MUST NOT be put of by the genre, Hicks does not sprinkle his books with unintelligible gobbledy gook that would put most of us of, no, his is a thought provoking opus of tenderness one minute followed by unforgiven brutality the next! In Empire a young boy witnesses his parents slaughtered and his planet decimated by the Kreelan Warriors.  There is the tenderness and growing love between him and another orphan in the 'workhouse planet' he is assigned to by his human rescuers, and then there is the renewed hatred for the Kreelans as he is captured and his second home is destroyed by the Kreelans!

All three books are fast paced and unlike many books it is sprinkled with characters who all have  a story to tell.  These stories all add to the spiders web of intrigue that Hicks so skilfully weaves adding political infighting between politicians and soldiers who believe that they are in a winnable war and are jockeying for their own seats of power, to Warriors of The Kreelan Empire whose only desire is to fight and Die with Honour for Her, The Empress.

Dead Soul, brings those of us who have discovered In Her Name, up to date with the Kreelans and how the war was started.  It seemed shorter than the previous novels, or was it that I was just reading faster,  and at the end the only regret you have is, that it did end!  You feel, when reading one of these books, elated, you feel hatred for the Kreelans, then you don't, how can that be, they are killing machines, they do not give up, they do not retreat and they do not regroup when they themselves are being killed in battle, they just keep coming, survive and win, or die, there are no alternatives in Kreelan warfare.    

It is this single mindedness, that Hicks I think, uses to bring out the best and the worst in his human characters .  The humans have to be as equally ruthless in their own defence, they have to be ingenious in the craft that they bring to survival and Hicks captures all of it and presents it to us in a way that makes us tearful and poignant, angry and aggressive but most of all he makes us not want to stop turning pages to see what happens next.

In recommending this author and his books to you I really am at a loss to tell you where to start whether it is with the first three books published, which are also available in an omnibus or now that he has finished the prequel of three books 'from the beginning', but, whichever way you choose to go, you will be hooked!

Good reading 

Series rating: A definite 5 stars out of 5

See also: Season of the Harvest - Book Review (also by Michael R Hicks)

Book Review - Season of the Harvest by Michael R Hicks

Season of the Harvest a fast paced thriller by Michael R Hicks  set around the world of GMO''s, or, Genetically Modified Organisms!

The story begins with an FBI agent breaking into a laboratory in an attempt to gather evidence that the company running it is modifying crop seeds in such a way that when introduced into the food chain, they will change the genetic make up of the human population on earth.  He dies, horribly, during this failed attempt and we discover that he has gone rogue from the Agency.

His friend also an Agent, while banned from getting involved because of his closeness to the murdered agent, begins to investigate off the books and the story develops into one of frightening terror.

He discovers that the 'people' behind the modified crop seeds are not in fact human and while we do not find out whether they are 'alien' from another planet or whether they are as indigenous to earth as we are, we discover that the seeds have been modified in such a way that once introduced they will rewrite OUR DNA and we will turn into them.  To do this, they have to ensure that their seed replaces the normal food seed that is planted around the world and that the seed banks, containing samples of every food and plant seed that currently grows on the planet and that are housed around the world are destroyed.

The EDF, a group who have been set up and are based in an old ICBM base in California are leading the fight to stop, 'The Harvesters' as we discover the name given to the protagonists of this book and who are vile shape shifting creatures that can take human form .  Hicks borrows slightly from 'The Termintor' in that cats are the only ones able to detect 'The Harvesters' either in their normal or human forms and we find that they play a big part in the story warning the heroes and us when The Harvestors are about to make an appearance.

The action is set in USA but the battle moves to Norway as the only surviving 'seed bank' comes under attack, after all the others around the world are destroyed.   Of course the evil plan will only work if The Harvesters have human conspirators and when the President is blown up The vice President is sworn in and we discover that he is a conspirator who says, " I know there is a special place in Hell reserved for me for what I've done".  And to discover what would make a US President have his own place reserved in Hell, you will have to read the book.

Hicks gave us his spectacular and futuristic Human vs Alien space opera with the In Her Name series which once started you cannot put down.  In Season of The Harvest he has brought us back into the here and now and gives us a sight of what could be.  As he points out in his notes at the end of the novel, the governance and development of GMO's seems to be wholly unregulated in the USA and they do not need, like Europeans,  to put it on the food packets, informing American that they may be consuming something that is not as natural as some of us would like or believe that our food is au natural, so all in all an excellent earth bound and contemporary subject matter that turned out to be a explosive book to read.   I give it 5 stars out of 5

Best Wishes