Misplaced Threats
by Alan Zimm

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Sci-fi

From the official synopsis: Decades after The Shift, 17 Systems were locked into an entrenched authoritarian government ruled by gene-selected elites. ‘The 35 ‘royal’ Families and 50 Great Corporations control the Federated government, as a self-centered tyranny, the very definition of fascism.

Mike just wants to open a restaurant to earn some money. Ghost just wants to be left alone to live his life and breathe oxygen without being fined. But they, along with many others, learn that the system is not set up to work for them, to help them in any way, or to care about anyone but the elite.

I struggled to write the synopsis for this book, because I struggle to explain the main plot. A lot of characters are introduced early on, though eventually Mike and Ghost rise to the top as the two biggest characters (Mike being the main, in my mind). Almost everything else in the book was some kind of support to their stories, minus one side plot that I think could have easily been cut and the book wouldn’t have lost anything. Even though I wasn’t sure what the main plot was though, I enjoyed the book overall. I’m not a space opera expert by any means, but I really appreciated the world building in this book. Major and minor details worked together really well, and I felt immersed in the overall setting. More specifically, Mike’s restaurant is amazing! There’s a lot of creativity there, and it’s one of the reasons I was always happy to go back to Mike’s POV.

The author is great with characters and dialog. Conversations, especially between patrons of Mike’s restaurant, feel completely realistic. Part of that is also involved in the world building I mentioned earlier—being futuristic and set far from Earth, there would have to be a lot of different terminology, and there is, yet I never felt bogged down by it. In fact, there are even quite a few pop-culture references in the book, and even some more obscure references (one of which particularly amazed me), and they actually fit in really well.

My biggest issue with this book, aside from the one side plot I mentioned earlier than didn’t seem like it added much and was pretty anti-climactic and unsatisfying, is the heavy sci-fi elements. This type of sci-fi is not something I normally read, so it may be completely normal, but I did a lot of skimming throughout the book when piloting of ships, specifics about the mechanics of the food delivery in the restaurant, things like that, got too detailed. I knew I wasn’t going to follow it anyway. But overall, I enjoyed the book and hope that the author is going to continue the series (the first one was originally published in 2023) so I can read more about these characters and (fingers crossed) maybe a little more about the side plot that I felt went nowhere. And one more thing—this book is self-published, and though I’d imagine a publisher may have made some changes to the style and flow, it avoids many of the annoyances that I often find in self-published books. If you’re interested in reading this book, I’d recommend it.

I received a copy of this book for free from the author in exchange for an honest review.

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