Captain Grif of the Fool’s Errand is brash, foolhardy, and lucky to be alive. He’s also unlucky enough to have pulled off the kind of score that attracts the wrong attention. When the powers-that-be want him to pull it off again, he has no choice but to hope for luck again. Luck had other plans.

This is a fun space opera romp with a ship and crew from the wrong side of the space station. The title comes from the fact that Grif’s crew commonly make side bets on their various success or failures, with Ktk (the bug of an unpronounceable race of an unpronounceable planet) often taking bets against their success. The crew and denizens vary across several races, so this is not a human-only setting, with some like Ktk much less human than others. But they were all quite fun.

The score they have to pull off turns into an involved heist at the behest of one government against another. They’re essentially after a McGuffin, but that doesn’t diminish the fun. Plenty of things go wrong, and they can almost never catch a break, but in the end, Grif and his crew are able to turn even the worst hand into a winner.

Think Firefly with more dirt.

About the reviewer:

Dan Thompson started writing fiction at the age of ten. Luckily for the world, all copies of that early Star Wars rip-off have been lost to time and Sith retaliation. Moving on from that six-page handwritten epic, he has self-published two books with more on the way – honest!

He lives near Austin with his wife and three children, drives old police cars, wears kilts when the weather permits, and is generally considered to be the weirdo next door. Fortunately, the neighbors don’t know how weird he really is.

Find out more about Dan at http://www.danthompsonwrites.com