The Lyons' Pride

The Phoenix Initiative, Book 1

By: Chris Kennedy, Marisa Wolf

Narrated by: Daniel Wisniewski

Length: 9 hrs and 18 mins

Publisher's summary

No other Human is more enigmatic than the Lyon.

On the African savanna, the male lion is the lord who watches over his family, while the females of the clan do the real work.

Joel “The Lyon” Lyons thought that owning a mercenary company would be similar—he could sit back and allow the Lyoness to run the Pride. Everything would go well, money from successfully completed contracts would flow like water into his bank accounts, and everything would be as easy as it had been for him when he’d owned a chain of highly successful restaurants.

It’s easy to be full of pride when everything is going your way.

But when he runs afoul of Peepo, the Veetanho who is arguably the most successful mercenary general in galactic history, he finally meets his match—someone who is every bit the master of logistics he is—and he is brought low.

The true measure of a man isn’t in never being knocked down, though—it’s in what you do when you are. When Peepo leaves him for dead on the battlefield, will the Lyon slink away from the galactic spotlight, or will he get back up again and let the galaxy hear him roar?

©2022 Chris Kennedy and Marisa Wolf (P)2022 Chris Kennedy and Marisa Wolf

Lyons and felines and rats ... Oh My!

This is my first introduction to Chris Kennedy and Marisa Wolf and I'm hopeful after listening to Book 1 of the series.

If you're interested in a hard-edge military space opera, this book isn't for you. However, if it's bumbling galactic mercenary entertainment you seek, you'll like this, even with its shortcoming.

The story revolves around an impetuous husband who tends to make ridiculous decisions on selling off lucrative businesses at a loss and dumping the sale proceeds in other ventures which he had little acumen in. All these without consulting his level-headed badass wife beforehand who, while she is livid with him once she finds out, she loves the guy and he, somehow, always finds a way to make it work out. That is, until he decided to buy a galactic mercenary organization which, like the other venture, he knew little about and from there, things go sideways ... a lot.

There were areas where the plot sort of jumps around, making it difficult to understand if the authors had spent the time to focus on the continuity of the story, but it does eventually settle down and move forward in a somewhat predictable manner. There are some scientific areas that are superficially described, e.g, nanite ejections to strengthen the body without even attempting to explain the What and How of it. Also, the anti-aging serum somehow kept the MC and his wife from aging but, much like Olympian gods, their child ends up growing into an adult.

Still, with Daniel Wisniewski performance, the novel was always just a sentence or two away from snickering and wanting to continue on.

Onto book 2.