Colonel Carl Butler charges back into the world of military crisis, corporate malfeasance, and intergalactic mystery in the action-packed fifth Planetside novel from science fiction master Michael Mammay.
Carl Butler has returned to his home planet from the moon Taug and is looking forward to some rest and relaxation. But following two mysterious deaths connected with the Taug mission, he realizes that the intruders that recently set off his home’s security system might be looking to add him to the death toll.
Having been Butler’s muscle on numerous missions, Mac is no stranger to getting involved with mysteries that should be none of his business. So when the daughter of one of his gym members goes missing, he offers to help. Mac assumes she’s a simple runaway, but the case turns out not to be so clear-cut. Wondering if these strange occurrences are somehow related, Butler—along with Mac, Ganos, and the rest of his small crew—once again finds himself neck deep in intrigue.
As the clues for the various cases begin to intertwine, Butler sees the hand of an old enemy at work, and…well…he’s never been one to sit back and wait for something to happen. Gathering the team, he heads off across the galaxy to confront his suspects head-on.
But this time, they’re waiting for him.

My Review:

After five books, my feelings about Carl Butler have not changed a bit. I STILL want to buy the man a drink. The only thing that has changed is that now I’d try to include Mac in the drinking, in the hopes that one of them would spill something about their escapades. Just what gets put on the page is one hell of a story. I can only imagine just how hair-raising the shenanigans they leave out must be.

That may not be possible, but I still have THIS story – and it’s a doozy. Then again, it’s a Carl Butler operation. Those are ALWAYS doozies because Butler is a chaos magnet of the first order and can’t seem to resist getting in over his head if only so he can have the excitement of getting himself and his team out.

His team thinks he has a death wish. He thinks that it’s just that he’d rather go out getting the job done than sitting on his ass in retirement. He’s clearly not much good at just not doing much, so when he gets bored with that, stuff happens.

Which is exactly what happens in Blindside. In fact, it’s exactly what one of Carl’s entirely too numerous enemies is counting on happening. Because even though Carl thought he had wrapped up the SNAFU on Taug with a nice neat bow just a few months ago (that story is in Darkside), that doesn’t mean that Taug, or the SNAFU, or the people he caught in said SNAFU, are through with him.

Carl really should have known better. Whenever you mess with and mess up an intergalactic corporation run by a psychopathic megalomanic, someone is bound to carry a grudge – right to your doorstep.

But Carl’s not the one who gets sucked in this time. Instead, it’s his Security Chief, Mac, who gets caught up in a sob story that’s rather similar to the one that kicked off Darkside – at least looking at things in hindsight. Mac REALLY should have known better. After all, it’s his JOB to know better.

But there’s plenty of chagrin to go around on Carl’s, and everyone else’s, blindside as the whole team ends up on a wild goose chase where the goose turns out to be them. Carl may be the one in the mysterious crosshairs, but since the team’s job is to protect him they’re all along for the ride. And in the line of fire.

A firing line that sends them straight back to Taug, where this particular misadventure really began, doing what they do best. Doing their damndest to keep Carl Butler alive so that he can figure out what’s been hidden in this particular crowd of shadows so that he can pull all of their nuts out of the fire he’s gotten them into.

Hopefully, as usual hopefully but not certainly, in the same number of pieces that they each came with. If they’re a bit dinged up, well, that’s the cost of cleaning up someone else’s mess. Again.

Escape Rating A: I love this series. I think that’s pretty clear at this point. I’ve read the whole thing and enjoyed every single book, and Blindside was absolutely no exception. The whole Planetside series is pretty much SF mystery in a military SF or at least quasi-military SF setting and I’m just so there for the whole thing. I actually think it’s better now that things have shifted a bit out of being strictly military SF because instead of Carl having orders to obey or get around, he’s a more-or-less free agent but has all his military experience to fall back on. Or get tripped up by. Or both.

This fifth entry in the series is a direct follow-up to Darkside, and does have some important callbacks to the events in the first book, Planetside. I would say that means that this is not a good place to start. Howsomever, if this is where you start, or especially if it’s been a while since you’ve read the series (Planetside came out in 2019) there’s a terrific summary of the events of the previous books at the front of this one. For which this reader is very grateful.

What makes Carl such a fascinating character is that he’s really smart about getting himself out of the soup once he’s boiling in the pot, but kind of dumb about how he gets dumped there in the first place. He misses the action, he’s easily bored and therefore easily convinced to do something dangerous to stop being bored, but at the same time recognizes that he’s not as young as he used to be.

This particular story sits right at the intersection between “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on ME” and “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action”. Carl is the fool in this story, but the set up is SO thorough, elaborate and expensive that it takes way more than three happenstances for the situation to add up to enemy action – and by that point he’s in the thick of it.

It’s been a wild goose chase from the very start, with Carl as the goose. But because Carl wants it to be real a bit more than he should he doesn’t put the pieces together until it’s too late. Once he’s in, he can’t get out and doesn’t even want to, because he can’t bear to leave a job undone and this whole mess is about a job that he thought was done but no longer is.

And it’s just damn fun to watch him shove aside the smoke and break all the mirrors to figure out what’s really going on, what’s been hidden, who is doing the hiding, and why those forces have expended so much time, energy and money in obfuscating so damn much. Because the coverup, as usual and in real life as well, is considerably more interesting, and more damaging all around, than the original bad act ever was.

Meaning that I had an absolute blast with this book, even as I watched Carl and Company nearly get blasted to smithereens. And still manage to not merely survive, but to save as much of the day as is possible.

A good time was had by all. Except the villains. And even they will live to set a new trap for Carl Butler another day, just a whole lot lighter in the wallet. It’s too bad that they don’t suffer a bit more punishment, but it’s righteous enough to satisfy both Butler and the reader.

About that drink I want to offer both Butler and Mac. If I could include John Perry from Old Man’s War in that, so I could just sit and listen to these old soldiers swap stories, I’d be one very happy camper. I’d also do my damndest to have a recording device so that I wouldn’t miss a single word. It would be awesome.

In the meantime, I’m happy to have more of Carl and Mac’s adventures, at least a couple more years. However (and dammit) the author has announced that this series will wrap up with the seventh – still untitled – book. The sixth book, tentatively titled Otherside, is planned for this time in 2027, with the wrap in 2028. I’m already at the stage of not being sure whether to cry because it’s over or smile because it happened. I don’t want this series to end but recognize that it has to. After all, Carl has already been through more lives than a cat. His luck has to run out sometime. But damn, I’m going to miss him. Thankfully, though, not yet.