While Spartans get all the glory, no soldier?not even the legendary Master Chief?wins a war on their own. Gunnery Sergeant Edward Buck and his team of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers (ODSTs) played a major role in saving the Earth from all-out invasion at the end of the Covenant War?acts of bravery and ingenuity that did not go unnoticed by the United Nations Space Command.

Now, after many Spartans have been killed in battle and the Master Chief is listed as MIA, the UNSC decides to create a new generation of Spartans to defend humanity from threats both outside?and within. When they come to Buck with an extraordinary proposition, he is forced to make a life-altering decision. With the Covenant War finally over, is it time for him to finally retire to the sidelines for a life he could only dream about…or is he prepared to step up and become part of the military’s new blood?

Source: Amazon.com

Not sure how this one snuck past me, though now that I’ve read it I can see why there wasn’t a whole bunch of hoopla made about it, it’s primarily just a filler book from HALO: ODST to HALO 5: GUARDIANS, the upcoming halo game that has a pretty big job of fixing the mistakes of the last halo game.  If you’ve been following along, you know that they made some pretty (stupidly) drastic changes to the SPARTAN program that opened the floodgates to letting pretty much anyone become  SPARTAN.  As a function of that fundamental change, the surviving ODST team from HALO: ODST have been upgraded from normal high level hell jumpers to SPARTAN IVs.  There’s some pretty major changes in the ODST team though, some of which seemed to be there only for the sake of having something major happen, and I really think that this should have been two or three times longer to give the characters the story they deserved.  That being said, I enjoyed pretty much every page of it’s 188 page length and I’m hoping to see more from Matt Forbeck, he treated the HALO cannon pretty well.