Mercy Kill

Good story but Ebook has a lot of errors. Misspelled words and pages repeated instead of the next page that was supposed to be there.

This book is confusing and hard as hell to follow. It’s like watching Return of the Jedi, reading all the books and then watching The Force Awakens. You suddenly find yourself in a completely different universe where nothing makes any sense.

Nothing has anything to do with anything that happened in the first nine of the series and the book merely has the title slapped on it for brand recognition. Piggy is the only Wraith that comes back, the others are just a hodgepodge group of nobodies we’ve never heard of. That hardly counts for “putting the Wraith’s back together” as Face said he was doing. And why did he say HE was putting them back together? One of the others we’ve never heard of was apparently in charge of recruiting.

Very difficult read. It’s more of a chore than entertainment. I make it through one or two pages a day at best.

This was a bit of a struggle to read. The much-anticipated return by Allston to the Wraiths was a let down. The whole time I was reading this novel I felt like I was missing something. A LOT of somethings. The book is written in such a way that these characters and their back stories seem to be something the reader is already supposed to know. Face appears in this novel so little that he wouldn't even qualify as a supporting role. It's pretty much Piggy's story. That's alright - I like Piggy. But the gap between Solo Command and Mercy Kill is so large - with so many wars in between - that it just felt like a gulf that couldn't be crossed. Too many missions have occurred in those intervening years (unbeknownst to the reader) that I don't recognize any of the characters. The familiarity with which they speak makes it clear that they know each other and there's a feeling of expectance that I should therefore know them as well. I'm left wondering if these were characters from the X-Wing comic series that were introduced there but never to the EU novel reader.
Furthermore, the plot just didn't make a lot of sense to me. Previously, the Wraiths were out to get big bad Warlord Zsinj. Good for them - that made sense. He was big and bad. This time around, though, the mission is unclear. "We think this general is dirty and we're going to prove it." Ok... What's the motivation? Where's the imminent threat? Oh, someone had a suspicion and passed it to Face to check out? Seems pretty thin. Through a series of missions - some told in too little detail, some in too much - the Wraiths claim to have found the proof they were after. However, as the reader, I question the logic there. The proof they find is that there is, in fact, some shady dealings going on but they never find anything that proves that the man at the top was directly involved. Sure, people in his organization are guilty, but the man himself? They cling to that with such determination and it turns out to be correct, but the entire time I'm questioning why they're leaping to these elementary conclusions with such conviction. I just felt like this plot was something slapped together because a few bucks could be made. Oh, and where's the squadron? Weren't these supposed to be pilot commandos? There were no squadrons and no starfighters except for one brief scene with two of them. But I hardly think that's worth the title of "Wraith Squadron."
I don't want to suggest that there weren't any enjoyable parts to this novel. Allston did his usual great job of capturing the wit and cheerful mayhem that is Wraith Squadron, but the feeling wasn't the same because it was a cast of strangers (with only one or two exceptions). In short, it was a decent read but it was not a Wraith Squadron novel.