The Jessica Keller Chronicles: Promising start but on the whole rather mediocre series.

The Jessica Keller Chronicles by Blaze Ward
My rating: ⭐ ⭐ 1/2 out of 5 stars

Jessica Keller has a reputation as a maverick commander. It almost got her court martialed. Now it has gotten her a new command in an obscure sector, with orders to ignite a new front in the eternal war.

But her old nemesis, Imperial Admiral Emmerich Wachturm, stands in her way.

Worlds will fall before their feud ends, but only if she can forge her crew of strangers into a weapon. Otherwise, disaster looms.

This is a review of the nine book series The Jessica Keller Chronicles. When I started the series I felt it had quite a bit of promise. Some people even compared it to the Honor Harrington series. Well, that it is not. Far from it. As a matter of fact I found this series to be quite mediocre. Disappointing even.

I do like the main protagonist and quite a few of the characters around here and I do like the overall story. However, I found it rather poorly implemented.

The first couple of books where quite alright. Keller was introduced, there was quite a bit of nice space combat and overall it looked promising. They never managed to reach above the 3 out of 5 stars mark though. Later in the series, quite a few books never managed to reach above 2 out of 5 stars for me.

There were quite a bit of political asshattery in these first books as well but luckily during the course of the series the asshats where given the ass whooping they deserved.

However, in book 4 the author started to cater for certain segments of readers and the political bullshit and poorly hidden preaching took a turn for the worse.

From then on the series became very uneven, to me at least. Strange politics where intermixed with the good parts for the story and the good parts where not really that good to begin with. The military action, world building and strategy is very far indeed from the upper echelon of authors like David Weber, Doug Dandridge or Christopher G. Nuttall just to mention a few.

When the “real” enemy was introduced later in the series some of the actions, like “diplomatic” missions to enemy worlds and the reaction of the people on these worlds just became nonsensical. Doug Dandridge made a much better job of introducing and fighting this particular kind of enemy for instance.

So unfortunately this series was a bit of a downer for me.