Killbox by Ann Aguirre

ISBN: 9780441019410

I purchased this book.

Sirantha Jax, book 4

This review contains spoilers for previous books in the series.

When last we left Sirantha Jax, one of the elite jumpers born with the gene that allows navigators to travel through the subspace area known as grimspace, she’d escaped an alien planet she was sent to as an ambassador after breaking her love and captain, March, out of the alien jail.

Killbox starts fast and remains very hard to put down. What was hinted at in the last books, the increasing invasions of the flesh-eating monstrous aliens known as the Morgut, has become a full on, planned attacks as the Morgut are clearly declaring war on their favorite tasty snacks. However Farwan, the mafia/Empire-like organization that had been protecting the human worlds, have been exposed for their corrupt actions, namely the sabotage and destruction of a ship carrying beloved political emissaries (and the subsequent brainwashing attempting to set Jax herself up for the crash that killed everyone but her). Now that Farwan has fallen there is no one else to step up and protect human space from pirates, the Syndicate and the Morgut. The Conglomerate has been too dependent on others for too long and lacks the force to fight the coming war.

So it does the next best thing, and hires March to build an Armada to stave off the attacks while plan B formulates. Meanwhile other members of March’s crew (all becoming increasingly more important) are at work at a variety of projects. Jax is training the first non-Farwan trained jumper. Doc is working on tech that will turn Jax’s ability to heal from grimspace damage into a strength rather than a random mutation and Dina is hard at work trying to hash out the secrets of the Morgut ability to jump anywhere, not just from hot spots.

The truth is that they know very little about the Morgut other than they have a 97% kill rate against humans. So now Jax and March and the crew find themselves on the front lines of a war against an nearly unknown, but very deadly enemy with the clock ticking until the major invasion begins.

Killbox is a fabulous book. It’s complex, and exposes more background of grimspace and human space travel and how the world came to be where it is in this series. Furthermore Jax has changed as well, into a solid, determined woman willing to face down ultimate evils to help the people she loves.

This series is far too complex to ever fit into a single book, or a trilogy and nearly impossible to put down. Fans of the big SF flicks out there, from Serenity to Star Wars, will find everything they love about those stories in this one. Princesses, space ship battles, monsters, lasers and aliens, Killbox has it all and is poised to thrust this series into a strong, tight spin to its (I hope) victorious end.