“Ginger fumed all the way back to her office. No one had ever busted their butt harder for the Galactic Security Academy, yet she had to prove herself in order to get a promotion she had more than earned years ago. Then to be sent on some rescue mission to save some useless rich punk was a complete slap in the face! But the worst offense of all was being sent on some suicide mission and being stuck alone with Sam for goodness only knew how long. Sitting behind her desk, she spent the next twenty minutes cursing him. Damn him for coming back! Damn him for walking back into her neat organized life. Moreover, may the ceiling fall down around his head for looking like some blond Adonis god of her deepest-most-secret desire.”

General Ginmatager Hardigan most definitely has a problem, the least of which is being sent on a rescue mission to a planet of werewolves with a man from her past who just happens to be a hybrid vampire. Does it follow that the man from her past, the man who broke her young heart, wants Ginger for his very own and does not care that duty and obligation weigh heavy on the shoulders of the light of his life? After all, he gave her up once for his own altruistic reasons, but now he is back and he is not going to let her stand in his way. And if the past is going to keep intruding, then he is just going to have to do something about that, too.

My problems with this ambitious story began with the prologue which tried too hard to tell me about a previous adventure, complete with characters, Ginger and company had, and it continued with the imposition of popular language coming from the mouths of characters far removed from the here and now. If you are a member of a future galactic security force which can hop, skip, and jump from galaxy to galaxy, then you probably are not going to use 20th century colloquial expressions. Then there is the shift in terms for military rank. For this security force, a General ranks lower than a Major. Military ranks can act as tropes for the reader bringing the unfamiliar into the range of familiar. In “Past Regrets”, the use of ranks repeatedly threw me out of a story I was already struggling with.

Why did I struggle so much with this one? I never felt like I was there with the characters. I was not walking the corridors of the space station with them. I was not standing in the medical bay with them or on the planet with them. (The planet of the Baygers who the Zogones are presently at war, which also jarred me when I was told its axial rotation gave it sixteen hours of daylight and only four hours of night. )

Another major source of struggle for me involved the lack of response to the action scenes by those characters intimately involved with moving the story forward. What few reactions we see are not used to develop the characters into real people I can relate to. Then, there seemed to be an excessive amount of unnecessary exposition which explained or detailed things I wasn’t interested in. I wanted to see the characters doing things, even feeling things. Instead, I got zip. I reacted more to the events in a “What the Heck” response than the players did. I certainly had not been prepared for the skills and abilities Ginger has at her disposal. They came right out of the ether at me.

I feel like I have been cheated out of what has the bones of a very good action-adventure story. A mere one hundred pages is not nearly enough to build the story world, develop the characters, and tell a story with all the potential this one has.

Book Stats:

• e-book, digital format
• Publisher: New Concepts Publishing
  
• Book Length: Novella
  
• Language: English
• ISBN: 978-1-60394-251-5

To purchase an eBook copy of Past Regrets click here.

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