Desert Planet

The RIM Confederacy, Book 6

By: Jim Rudnick

Narrated by: Nicholas Thurkettle

After 55 years of waiting for an answer to be invited to join the RIM Confederacy, the planet Enki has responded with an alternate idea - that the RIM Confederacy join them instead. Captain Tanner Scott is sent on the diplomatic mission to get the Enkians to reconsider.

He and the Atlas crew help the new ambassador to find a way to bring the Enki into the RIM Confederacy without exposing to them the secret of why that is so important. If the Enkians can be persuaded, the RIM could gain access to the newly discovered metal ores that appear to make a ship invulnerable.

But all of the RIM wants to shortcut the process, so the Atlas needs to quarantine the planet as well as maintain full diplomacy with the Enkians. When the Caliphate gets involved and back room deals are made it all comes to a head at the Atlas Adept Officer's trial for terrorism.

Captain Scott will try to defend his officer by acting as his defense counsel - a job that is made even more difficult as the Enkian society and justice system are both hard to learn and hard to navigate.

©2016 Jim Rudnick (P)2016 Jim Rudnick

Thrilling Interplay between Characters Best Yet

What did you love best about Desert Planet?

This was probably the best of Rudnicks Character work yet for the RIM Confederacy works. Although there was less in the actual 'Combat' sense in this book, it relied heavily on the interplay between the characters and a race called the Enkians on the Desert Planet. This planet is on the edge of the RIM, and is off key Political and Military strategic significance. All of the RIM Council are after it, and it is up to Scott, in his new role as Barony Captain, to get them to join the Barony.
As such, this becomes a fascinating book about tactics and strategy, and characters, more than anything else. And Rudnick certainly delivers.
This is an utterly fascinating and engaging book, and thoroughly enjoyable.

What other book might you compare Desert Planet to and why?

All the other books in the RIM Confederacy Series

Have you listened to any of Nicholas Thurkettle’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

No I have not - However, I thought that the narration was really good. It was obviously different to previous narrators for this series, and it did take some getting used to, but after that short adjustment, I thought that it was done really well.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

No

Any additional comments?

Rudnick writes so well as he combines the Military, Royalty and Political situations into a story as well as the personalities of a few key characters to tell an interesting and engaging story. This is Military Sci-Fi as it should be, interesting, detailed, exciting, fun, with some really fast paced and well described combat scenes, as well as brilliant dialogue and intrigue across sectors of space. Outstanding effort

raw file

The main issue with this book is the audio file is not edited. The reader will make a mistake and then there will be a load beep and then the reader will redo the section. So it looks like the reader sent in the file in to get the final edit and the published just posted it without editing. The main issue with the writing is that every character has the speech patterns.