Admiral

February 29, 2016
Danker’s debut tries to be hard SF, but is too shallow and thin to make much of an impression. A team of strangers wake from sleep storage to find their spaceship at a standstill and abandoned by the crew. The three newly graduated cadets and someone who may or may not be an admiral must put aside their suspicions of one another and work together to survive. Danker stocks his book with characters who never develop, places them in peril that never quite strikes, and lowers stakes even when he’s trying to raise tension. The nameless protagonist is saddled with a mysterious past, a drug addiction that barely affects the story, and a series of crises that never reach a critical stage. The antagonists are intended to be terrifying, but are as undeveloped as the rest of the characters. The action proceeds at a fair pace and is easy to follow, but there are too many clichés and conveniences to create a solid arc. The lack of definition and narrow imagination leave the writing flat and unremarkable. For a first effort, the workmanlike quality shows skill, but there is little to differentiate it from other novels in the genre.

March 1, 2016
The first in a series of sci-fi military thrillers finds a crew fighting to stay alive amid mysterious circumstances. A man awakens in a crashed spaceship on an unknown planet. Both his uniform and the ship's computer claim he's an admiral of the Evagardian Empire, but the three young Evagardian recruits on board with him are skeptical, as he neither looks nor acts like an admiral. With the Empire at only tentative peace with the Ganrean Commonwealth, this alleged admiral could be a spy. However, they all soon realize they have far more pressing problems: they are marooned, their ship has been sabotaged, and worst of all, the planet they're on may harbor hostile life. All four of them must somehow learn to work as a team if there's any hope of them surviving. Narrated from the perspective of the titular admiral, the plot quickly turns into a one-damn-thing-after-another survival story--the characters formulate a plan, the plan fails, things go from bad to worse, lather, rinse, repeat. While this should be an exciting, breakneck ride, the story too often gets bogged down in graceless worldbuilding. The details of the history between the Evagardian Empire and the Ganrean Commonwealth feel tacked-on and never give readers a reason to care about either side. However, the mystery surrounding who the admiral is (or isn't) is the story's biggest flaw, as the charade drags on far too long, aided by the unreliable narrator, until, finally, the secret is laid bare in a clumsy, exposition-laden moment in the book's final chapter. A not-very-thrilling thriller dressed up in mediocre sci-fi clothing.

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May 1, 2016
In Danker's nonstop debut, the terrifying, suspenseful action of James Cameron's Aliens mixes with snarky Miles Vorkosigan's alter-ego Admiral Naismith from Lois McMaster Bujold's books. A fragile truce exists between the Evagardian Empire and the Ganraen Commonwealth prior to the beginning of peace talks. Civilians and military personnel employ sleep pods to travel the long distances through space. En route to their first assignment, three prime Imperial recruits and a passenger whose pod identifies him as an admiral wake up aboard the wrong ship with no power or crew on a treacherous, supposedly abandoned colony world. The trio of uniquely skilled academy graduates are baffled by and suspicious of their fellow survivor. Though he's obviously not a real admiral, their unnamed, enigmatic companion is definitely more than he seems, which is a good thing. To escape the deadly planet on which they are stranded, they are all going to have to work together. Fans of fast-paced military-science-fiction series will be eager to discover what thrilling, action-packed adventures are awaiting the admiral and his new confederates.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)