Book Review: Vanguard Strike by Jarom Strong

In this military space opera thriller, we follow a genetically and cybernetically enhanced super soldier after he was discharged, imprisoned, and then rescued to join a crew to pull off one last big job.

Lackan VanDunn, nicknamed Lax, was sold by his parents to the Paragon government and their Divinity corporate backers, as a child for the Vanguard soldier program, where he became one of the faceless super soldiers that united humanity, by force, and against the will of most of the people outside of the Paragon. Then as the final war ends, the Paragon discharges their Vanguard as a sign of goodwill and disarmament.

We’re left to guess as what happens between that and when the story starts, which features Lax as a chief contestant in a prison fighting contest, making money for his boss by manipulating the odds. Lax isn’t immortal, but he’s bigger, faster, stronger, tougher, and heals faster than a normal human being. By all rights, Lax should be the one running the gang, but he’s emotionally broken and reliant on a chemical used by the Paragon to control their puppets, as people call them.

He is then broken out by an old war buddy and recruited for a mysterious job. We learn that after the war, he started working salvage because of his experience fighting the rippers.

Rippers are the bestial counterpart to the Vanguard—bioengineered monsters whose only instincts are to kill. Not very smart, they are tough, vicious, feast on human flesh, and have a tendency to haunt the derelict ships left over from the war. And yeah, they’re created by the same company that created the Vanguards.

There are some definite Firefly vibes here, with the corporate-government partnership that rules the ‘verse, human-eating monsters lurking in the void of space, and desperate crews trying to pull off one last job and settle down. I really appreciated the grimier approach to the setting, and some of the thought-out implications of the worldbuilding (one of the characters has never been on a planet before and suffers agoraphobia the first time).

It’s much more high-tech than Firefly, however. I’d put it as being pretty squarely in the typical space opera type established by Halo. Actually, the Vanguards remind me a lot of the Spartans.

So, the overarching plot is this last salvage job, of a ship so secret that the crew finds themselves targeted by assassins who seem be tracking them to prevent them from reaching the ship, then working with a guerilla resistance movement who hates Lax because of his role in their world’s conquest.

There’s a solid little training montage which was a nice homage to the trope, as Lax tries to turn the two groups into a cohesive team capable of salvaging a ripper-infested ship. Even as he’s attempting to do this, however, he’s getting flashbacks from the last job that landed him in prison after everything went wrong, wiping out his entire crew.

The similarity between the two grew more notable over time, both to the reader and to Lax, which was very interesting to see it play out. Lax wasn’t just trying to accomplish this mission, he was trying to resolve the problems from his last job that still haunted him.

The final act of the story is every bit as explosive as expected from a story with this set up, with some excellent twists, self-realizations, and, overall, a very satisfactory ending. I won’t spoil any of it, because the mystery element really kept me intrigued.

Overall, the plot was not the most complex or original. For a military space opera like this, I didn’t expect it to be. Fundamentally, this is a heist-story mixed with a spy story. At heart, however, it’s a story about grief and consequences.

And Strong handles this story very well. It was the characters that really carried the story for me. They were all complex, none of them seemed trustworthy, and half of the mystery was just unraveling the conflicting motivations and true intentions, and coping with what happened. Lax’s reliance on frigicern to numb his emotions was a nice example of addiction as a coping method and gave a strong visual indicator of his inner changes, charted along with his relationship to the other members of the salvage team.

4/5 Stars

Recommended for anyone looking for an exciting and heartfelt space opera adventure.

Vanguard Strike releases on June 13, 2025 and can be ordered at this link (my Bookshop.org affiliate link).