Shadows of the Past was published as Book One of a planned trilogy under the overall Contra Alliance title.
This book sets up the world as Troy McBride experiences it from a prologue when he is a boy during which he overhears that he is an alien called a Nerrial. The Nerrial and other galactic forces have chose Earth to be the battleground for their intergalactic power plays. Troy spends most of the time being a dishwasher in a beach restaurant in Redondo Beach, California, while several different factions have a variety of adventures. The book suffers from extensive passive voice, a cast that is too big, and finally, it is pointless because the trilogy was never completed.

Readers who thrive on reading books with a very large cast of characters. Readers who enjoy lots of acronyms, military jargon, and detailed political exposition.

There were some descriptions and action parts when the book really took on a life of its own and presented me with fiction that I would have liked to read more of. There were about two pages like that in the whole book.

The book spends too much time repetitively droning on about China's politics. The cast is too large and everyone has at least two names. The names are used without much rhyme or reason and the same scene might use both names of one character. It gets hard to keep track of who I'm looking at in the text.

Do nothing as there is nothing to do. At the end of Shadows of the Past, Earth is about to be invaded by at least two galactic factions. There is no Book Two.

I tried to give this book a fair chance, but in the end I felt cheated by the author.
Book One was published in 2010. He had started a Kickstarter to make the book into a series of 33 comics, but he cancelled the Kickstarter in 2012 with the promise that the comics would be financed another way. Since then, there is nothing else to find on him online.

In the back flap of the book, it says that Tom Kolega has a master's degree in national security studies and spent several years working in aerospace and defense. Tom Kolega is most likely a pen name as the name doesn't come up anywhere on the internet.

I do not recommend this book for several reasons.
First: The trilogy was never finished. Readers are left with a cliffhanger that does not bring a single plot point full circle.
Second: The book was hard to get into as the plot really only took off on page 85 and it took until page 120 to see some action.
Third: The website in the back flap leads to an unsecured website with Asian script that is very obviously not meant for anyone under 18, with possibly illegal content.

The following excerpt is from page 56. It illustrates what to expect from this book. Similar paragraphs as the one below show up repeatedly throughout the book, seriously bogging down the book with politics instead of even telling a story. We're not even talking about showing a story.

"Decisions in India, China, Brazil, Iran, and Pakistan held great influence. Western economies and defense budgets had grown smaller. With the decline of America's military preeminence and the rise of China, forming new joint security arrangements through NATO trumped sovereignty concerns. Integrated joint forces could strengthen order and fill the American security vacuum. For this to happen on a large scale, CONTRA needed to succeed early as a test case. The strike force had to prove itself in the field."

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Created Jan 08, 2022 at 7:07pm • Submit your own review...