A review by lachesisreads
The Mission by Bob Mayer, Robert Doherty

2.0

The pandemic theme makes this pretty grim reading (particularly when people around you are getting sick with influenza left and right). However, I felt that this volume lacked some of the appeal of the earlier books. The novelty of the alien theme has worn off by now, and instead of forwarding the overarching plot of the series, this book introduces a number of ultimately (probably) insignificant subplots that felt superfluous and really went nowhere. There were also a lot of "info-dump"-passages where the content of the previous books was repeated, which gets rather tedious after a while. I think a "what happened before" chapter at the beginning of the book would have been more reader-friendly than randomly interspersed repetitions, but that may be just me. All in all this book left me with the feeling that the publisher said to the authors, "we want to make this a 10 book series. Bulk it out more!", and that this one was added for, well, bulk.
In all it's still a fast read and pageturner, but I suspect you might skip this particular one without missing out much in the series as a whole.