The ninth book I am reviewing is Letháo: The Secret King, an excellent science fiction novel by Dawn Chapman. It’s a space opera, within the same genre as books, films, and television shows like Star Trek, the Star Wars saga, Dune, and Battlestar Galactica. In some of the Amazon reviews for the book I saw claims that The Secret King follows a plot very similar to Battlestar Galactica. I’ve never seen the show so I couldn’t say. The Secret King was originally conceived as a thirteen-episode TV series (doing some research on it, I get the impression that a show might be coming in the future), and this comes across in the writing. Chapters feel episodic, so the book contains multiple small situations of conflict and resolution within the framework of a large conflict.

The overall story is this: the population of the planet Letháo…