Robert Repino’s Malefactor – War With No Name – Indie Book Spotlight

Hey, Readers! Welcome back for October’s Spotlight. This month we’re tackling Malefactor by Robert Repino. It’s the third full novel in the War With No Name series; I’ve previously spotlighted the first two entries Here and Here.

This one was released around my Birthday and I’d already pre-ordered via Audible as a li’l Birthday gift to myself… but the wonderful folks at Soho actually provided us here at Nerd News Social with a physical review copy earlier than that as well! Gotta love that! Thanks guys; I’m super grateful.

For the uninitiated, the War With No Name books take place in a world where a hyper-intelligent and monstrously long lived ant queen has been plotting for centuries to overthrow the world of man. She does this by increasing the size of her ants to an incredible degree (Think the old movie Them.) as well as lifting animals into sapience and giving them humanoid bodies and language. So, Them meets Planet of the Apes with a little bit of Creature from the Black Lagoon thrown in because who doesn’t love some watery nightmare fuel? Our hero through this starts as a regular household pet cat by the name of Sebastian who fits into this new world eerily well. He renames himself Mort(e) and really, despite becoming a warrior of renown, he has one thing on his mind – finding and reconnecting with his dog friend, Sheba, who he lost track of right before the world changed.

I love the first two books as well as the related novella, Cul De Sac, and so expectations for this entry were high! Can Malefactor settle things appropriately and tie together the loose ends of our previous outings?

It goes without saying, but here it is anyway! Spoilers lie ahead for the first two entries in this book series and minor spoilers for the third as well. If you want to learn what happens in this world more organically, grab the series, read through and we’ll meet back here once you’re done!

If, however, you’re ready to get into the meat of this Spotlight, sharpen your fangs and let’s go.

Book Stats

    Author: Robert Repino
    Formats: Kindle, Hardcover, and Audiobook.
    Price: $14.99 for the Kindle. $21.42 for the Hardcover. $27.44 for the Audiobook, or one Credit on Audible.
    Length: 457 pages or 13 hours and 46 minutes in audio format.
    Narrator: Bronson Pinchot
    Number of books in the series: At the time of writing, 3 full books and a novella.

Basic Premise

Just because Humanity is mostly gone, that doesn’t mean that the damage we’ve done to this world goes with us. Exacerbated by the activities of sapient animals too, but we laid the ground work.

We pick up this tale by meeting Mercy. She’s the Alpha of the Mudfoot; a tribe of wolves who cling to the old ways. They rarely use human speech, despite knowing it. They walk on all fours despite being able to walk on their hind feet. They stick to their territory despite it being poisoned. They stick to it despie the fact that it’s making them sick, weak and infertile. There was a massive flood that swamped their habitat and with those waters came toxic chemicals that were picked up and deposited, ruining everything. They call it the damnable. And while other wolf packs have made inroads towards uniting with the world, the Mudfoot have no intention of doing so. No matter what it’s costing them.

Next, we catch up with D’Arc. In the last novel she signed up for a mission of exploration aboard the al-Rihla; a ship set to travel to other countries to try and reopen international relations which had ceased after the change. Hosanna, a holy city where humans and animals coexist, had dispatched it a while ago and we see it through D’Arc’s eyes in the entries she makes in her unofficial log book. She notes not only happenings aboard ship but the weather conditions and her personal health as well. She makes note that she’s nauseous. In the mornings. Oh dear. They’ve been encountering ants as they go as well and this includes some with wings… it seems like the once depleted and defeated alpha ants are regrouping and coming back into their own. A scary prospect for this new, tenuous peace forged between human and animal kind.

And then we meet up with our old friend, Mort(e). He’s seemingly drowning his sorrows in a beaver run bar. This grizzled old soldier of a man is drinking a warm concoction of mint and catnip and watching beavers drink something that sounds like mead mixed with sawdust. Mmm! But of course, because Mort(e) doesn’t ever exactly relax, he’s running a surveillance operation from here. Humans have been traveling through the area with modified trash trucks and he just knows they’re up to something terrible… but what could it be? He’s bound and determined to find out, of course. Complicating this is his health – use of the translator device and the mental manipulation employed upon him by the Sarcops is having lasting effects. He drifts in and out of reality at inopportune times. He tastes salt in the back of his throat and then floats away into a mental ocean where he becomes a creature of the deep. You can imagine how difficult this makes trying to do anything. Castor, his friend and a generally nice little beaver guy isn’t sure if he should to continue helping Mort(e) with this crusade… torn between helping his friend and trying to safeguard him against a situation that could see him killed. It’s a tough choice for Castor.

Speaking of beavers – and this was a pleasant surprise – we get to catch up with Nikaya as well! She was the disgraced matriarch of Lodge City, the beaver settlement that Mort(e) and D’Arc rescued from a huge arachnid Sarcops in the last book. (A huge arachnid Sarcops that Nikaya set loose, mind you.) She’s now a prisoner of the bats and when all hell breaks loose, who does she wind up relying on? Gaunt of Thicktree, one of the last book’s stand out characters.

Underneath all these reunions is a tension brewing. Dogs in Hosanna are leaving and joining up with the Mudfoot to swell their numbers. In this world of mixed species, harmony among all is an ideal difficult for some to accept, easy to work towards for others, but ultimately very difficult to achieve.

Mercy presents herself to her pack and the world with a pup in tow… but remember what I said earlier about the damnable making the Mudfoot infertile? Suspicious, right!? You want to know where this little wolf prince appeared from? And what the humans are hauling in those trash trucks? And whether a traitorous beaver who set a monster on her own people can find redemption among her worst enemies?

You’d better read to find out.

My Take

The War with No Name books are consistently well written epics fueled by protagonists that shouldn’t work on paper. A declawed housecat turned dedicated human-slayer, turned farmer, turned part time mental fish, just for example. But you get into these character’s heads and it all comes together. Mort(e) is maybe one of my favorite fictional characters which is honestly surprising for me simply because I tend to gravitate towards unambiguously Good Guys. Mort(e) isn’t exactly that. He’s a soldier and he does things that make me literally wince. He has done since the first book. It’s a testament to how deeply the author understands his characters and how he’s able to present them in a compelling way.

The world itself is just as well detailed. The ants being less of a threat and the Sarcops no longer being a mainstay enemy, the world is starting to break up into factions because, as much as the Queen changed her uplifted animal soldiers, she made the mistake of using humanity as their base template and we’re, to our core, kind of tribal. It’s natural that these dogs-turned-people will band together if they feel like they’re getting a raw deal. It’s natural that the remaining humans are going to feel on the outs at least some of the time when they’re a minority, now. This was always going to happen, especially because this new peace is only a decade or so old and has some settling to do.

It does make the narrative feel a little smaller in scale, though. Mort(e) saved the world from the Queen in the first book and altered the whole world by doing it. He stopped the Sarcops from melting the polar ice caps and flooding the world in book two. This time? It’s smaller in scale. Saving a City isn’t quite in the same ball-park, even if that city serves as a symbol of inter-species peace.

That isn’t a complaint, mind you. Smaller scale stories are huge for the characters involved and that’s what this book does a great job of getting across.

I am… torn on the ending. No, I’m not going to tell you why! But I feel like there are fans of the series who are going to adore it along with fans who won’t. It’s a big deal and kind of polarizing for me… it’s a gutsy move, either way. Of course, it’s not all about the end! It’s more about the journey we took on the way and the trip was great. I can’t help but hope that this world is revisited at some point and we get to see how the events of this last book pan out for Mort(e)’s world.

All in all, Malefactor is a riveting tale with a lot of amazing work put into it. It definitely not only ties up loose threads from the prior books but does so in a way that brings in new stuff too. New species (The geese! Oh my god the geese.) as well as old ones getting a bit more development and shine. Highly recommended! The Audible version, read by Bronson Pinchot, is absolutely wonderful.

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