Ancient Enemy

by Lee Killough

A slow, agonizing death…

Teo Azkuharaz and his fellow archeologists expected to be answering scholarly questions in the ruins on the planet the team is bound for. But the questions become those of life and death when their ship is attacked and survivors taken prisoner by the yfel, a brutal reptilian race defeated millennia ago by the Virinian empire. Now returning to exact revenge...and refusing to believe their enemy no longer exists.
As a linguist able to speak with the yfel, Teo is given a slow-acting poison, and promised the antidote in return for information that will allow them to destroy the Virinians and their subject worlds. Resigned to dying, Teo pretends to cooperate, only to find himself a pawn in deadly plots and schemes among the yfel themselves.
Can he use those against his captors to save his ship’s crew, fellow archeologists, and the countless lives on planets the yfel plan to destroy—before he dies?

251 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 25, 2013

About the author

Lee Killough has been storytelling since the age of four or five, when she began making up her own bedtime stories. So when she discovered science fiction and mysteries about age eleven, she began writing her own science fiction and mysteries. Because her great fear was running out of these by reading everything her small hometown library had. It took her late husband Pat Killough, though, years later, to convince her to try selling her work. Her first published stories were science fiction and her short story, "Symphony For a Lost Traveler", earned a Hugo Award nomination in 1985.

She used to joke that she wrote SF because she dealt with non-humans every day...spending twenty-seven years as chief technologist in the Radiology Department at Kansas State University's Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital before retiring to write full-time.

Because she loves both SF and mysteries and hated choose between the two genres, her work combines them. Except for one fantasy, The Leopard’s Daughter, most of her novels are mysteries with SF or fantasy elements...with a preference for supernatural detectives: vampire, werewolves, even a ghost. She has set her procedurals in the future, on alien words, and in the country of dark fantasy. Her best known detective is vampire cop Garreth Mikaelian, of Blood Hunt, Bloodlinks, and Blood Games. Five of her novels and a novella are now available as e-books and she is editing more to turn into e-books.

Lee makes her home in Manhattan, Kansas, with her book-dealer husband Denny Riordan, a spunky terrier mix, and a house crammed with books.

Reviews

[Andrea]

'Old style' SF - the lion-like Teo is a space archaeologist/linguist investigating a dangerous area of space. His ship is attacked, and he tumbles from one critical survival situation to another, intersecting with many alien species as he does so.

I enjoyed the repeated problem solving (Teo is a very active protagonist). There were also a number of female characters in various roles, though it's worth noting that almost all of the named female characters are dead at the end of the book, and we have a scene where the active female character from the hostile race is basically dismissed back to the harem by her young son to focus on female concerns, and we later have male archaeologist reflecting that young son represents hope for that future's race. Hope for the future of the male members of the race, perhaps.

Will check out other books from this author.

[Stephen Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enjoyable read. It's not the best Killough I've read. It kept me entertained and engaged with the characters.