Review - Coalescence by Zen DiPietro

Spoiler alert: You may not want to read this review of the third book in the Dragonfire Station series if you haven’t already read the first two.

Fallon and her reconstituted “blackops” team, Avian Unit, are poised to save the galaxy, if they can only figure out from who. Fallon may have her memories back, but that doesn’t make it any easier to figure out who is behind the destabilization of the planetary alliance. But this story isn’t just all about the big picture of inter-galactic politics. Fallon also needs to patch up her relationship with the woman she married, Wren; a marriage that may, or may not, have been part of her assignment. She also has to balance that with her feelings for fellow teammate Raptor.

“Coalescence” effectively concludes the Dragonfire Station series, although it seems the author has plans for more stories set in the universe of the original series. All three volumes of the series stand up really well, with no major sags in the story line. I also really admire the way the books manage to talk about love and relationships without ever straying into romance territory. They remain steadfastly hard science fiction stories.

As I’ve commented on before about this series, the characters are well developed people, which is to say they can be quite complicated. The initial plot premise that starts out the first book, of a main character who wakes up with no memory of her identity, is a risky move and may even sound a bit cliché but it works quite well in this case. It allows us to get to know the main character and the circle of people around them as they get to know for themselves.

By the end of this book, there is quite a large cast of characters around Fallon, so it’s no wonder that there’s room for more stories that allow some of the more interesting peripheral characters to tell their own tales. Given the writing of these three books, it will definitely be a treat to read another story set in the same universe.

“Coalescence” is available from Amazon.