The Sharp End: Signed

With two syndicates dominating the planet of Cantilucca, Major Matthew Coke, the head of the Frisian Defense Force, watches as his mercenary force is used to evil ends by Cantilucca's leaders. 50,000 first printing.

Drake writes masterfully about future war in an environment that, if not dystopian, is clearly Hobbesian. Volume Six in the "Hammer's Slammers" series shows mercenary-turned-President Hammer keeping his army keen by hiring out elements of it to fight in "the sharp end"--anywhere in the galaxy where someone can afford to pay them to participate in the endemic local wars that humanity's expansion to the stars has done nothing to preclude. A survey team sent to evaluate a possible new assignment contains members with assorted physical and psychic problems. Major Matthew Coke's previous paymaster was killed by an assassin; logistics specialist Sten Moden has only one arm; electronics wizard Niko Daun trusts no one outside the regiment; Intelligence Lt. Robert Barbour cannot confront the corpses that result from his calculations; Johann Vierziger is a pitiless killing machine, alien even to his hardbitten cohorts. None of the team is prepared for the planet Cantilucca, a nightmare combination of contemporary Somalia, Colombia and New York City. Its only export is narcotics; its only law is provided by gangs who destroy but cannot govern. Will it prove too big a challenge for these cynical soldiers-for-hire? Drake combines action and politics in a fast-paced space opera, building to an unexpected, if typically bloody climax.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Another of Drake's military sf yarns about Hammer's Slammers, the expert mercenary troops of planet Nieuw Friesland. A small, handpicked team of specialists, led by Major Matthew Coke, arrives on planet Cantilucca to investigate the possibility of selling the Slammers' services. But Cantilucca, the primary source of a recreational drug, is ruled by two competing gangs--the L'Escorials and the Astras--both bloodthirsty, brutal, drug-addicted, unwashed, and generally arrogant. In Coke's judgment, either of the gangs could afford to hire Slammers to defeat the opposition, but this would leave the planet in the hands of a single gang, its already wretched inhabitants worse off than before. So Coke and company play both ends against the middle, slaughtering gangsters at every opportunity, until Cantilucca's interstellar bankers lose patience and send in their own troops. Things look bleak for Coke's team, but Slammer reinforcements arrive with impeccable timing. Agreeable slam-bang action for series fans, and certainly much more convincingly constructed than either The Jungle (1991) or Fortress (1987). -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.