Short Take: “Ghost Talking,” Michael Todd, Michael Anderle

Pros: The plot thickens!
Cons: …
Rating: 4 out of 5

Michael Todd and Michael Anderle’s Ghost Talking – Soldiers of Fame and Fortune, Book 6 is book six in the series Soldiers of Fame and Fortune Full Series Omnibus: 12 Book series. We’re back in the alien Zoo/jungle! Holly is splitting her time between helping Paula run J.B.’s bar and researching a cure to save his life. He’s already talking about having her take over the bar once he dies. Billie is making forays into the Zoo, as well as taking on other spy hijinks, in order to get Holly the information she needs to work on the cure.

There are some truly ass-kicking scenes of Billie collecting substances in the Zoo. That has to be my favorite part of this installment in the series. Billie went ahead and did the one thing you’re never, ever supposed to do: she pulled a whole plant. She made the Zoo MAD. There are also some nice sequences of her doing spy-stuff to get information for Holly, but I didn’t find those to be quite as immersive and believable.

I still wish the authors had given us a little more background on Holly to support the idea that she could come up with some sort of cure for J.B. Sure, her eidetic memory gives her an edge in internalizing all the research Billie is stealing for her, but I still don’t see how she goes from what we’ve seen so far to creating a whole new super-healing drug no one else has come up with yet. Also, since we know J.B. has seen doctors for his mysterious alien illness, why haven’t the corporations in question just up and kidnapped him to experiment on? (Or at least tried to buy him off to be a guinea pig?) I’d think they’d seriously want to study what was happening to him.

Looking forward to the remaining six books!