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Black Ocean: Mercy for Hire #1-4
Mercy for Hire Mission Pack 1: Missions 1-4
The galaxy’s worst bounty hunter just might be its most relentless hero.
Esper is a vigilante Samaritian with more moral fiber than business sense. Any bounty hunter worth the title knows three rules:
Collect half the money up front.
Never get emotionally attached.
Don’t ask nosy questions.
But with a heart of gold and her companion Kubu by her side, Esper sets out to make the galaxy a better place, preferably making enough money to pay for the fuel to get from one job to the next. But just because she’s not cut out to be ruthless doesn’t mean the galaxy is going to eat her alive.
After all, Esper is also a wizard.
Mission 1: Wayward Saint
A runaway teen needs protection and Esper takes the job. But a simple rescue and recovery turns ugly when Esper finds herself in the middle of a custody battle with a vicious pirate who’s hired a bounty hunter of his own.
Mission 2: Behind Blue Skies
On the run from troubles of her own, Esper tries to lie low on a suspiciously Utopian colony planet. Unable to keep out of other people’s troubles, Esper gets a terrifying look into justice on a world where truth is a matter of who you know.
Mission 3: House of the Orion Sun
Esper’s mission to protect the galaxy’s most vulnerable takes a turn for the seedy when she tracks a trafficking victim. How long can she hold out when her morals are tested at every turn?
Mission 4: Break the Chain
Esper’s own dark past catches up with her when bounty-hunting wizards corner her. Esper has faced down the galaxy’s worst criminals. Now, she’s going to be forced to stand up to one of the galaxy’s most esteemed institutions—Convocation of Arcane Practitioners.
Esper is a vigilante Samaritian with more moral fiber than business sense. Any bounty hunter worth the title knows three rules:
Collect half the money up front.
Never get emotionally attached.
Don’t ask nosy questions.
But with a heart of gold and her companion Kubu by her side, Esper sets out to make the galaxy a better place, preferably making enough money to pay for the fuel to get from one job to the next. But just because she’s not cut out to be ruthless doesn’t mean the galaxy is going to eat her alive.
After all, Esper is also a wizard.
Mission 1: Wayward Saint
A runaway teen needs protection and Esper takes the job. But a simple rescue and recovery turns ugly when Esper finds herself in the middle of a custody battle with a vicious pirate who’s hired a bounty hunter of his own.
Mission 2: Behind Blue Skies
On the run from troubles of her own, Esper tries to lie low on a suspiciously Utopian colony planet. Unable to keep out of other people’s troubles, Esper gets a terrifying look into justice on a world where truth is a matter of who you know.
Mission 3: House of the Orion Sun
Esper’s mission to protect the galaxy’s most vulnerable takes a turn for the seedy when she tracks a trafficking victim. How long can she hold out when her morals are tested at every turn?
Mission 4: Break the Chain
Esper’s own dark past catches up with her when bounty-hunting wizards corner her. Esper has faced down the galaxy’s worst criminals. Now, she’s going to be forced to stand up to one of the galaxy’s most esteemed institutions—Convocation of Arcane Practitioners.
24 pages, Audible Audio
Published January 3, 2019
About the author
J.S. Morin
199 books626 followersI am a creator of worlds and a destroyer of words. As a fantasy writer, my works range from traditional epics to futuristic fantasy with starships. I have worked as an unpaid Little League pitcher, a cashier, a student library aide, a factory grunt, a cubicle drone, and an engineer--there is some overlap in the last two.
Through it all, though, I was always a storyteller. Eventually I started writing books based on the stray stories in my head, and people kept telling me to write more of them. Now, that's all I do for a living.
I enjoy strategy, worldbuilding, and the fantasy author's privilege to make up words. I am a gamer, a joker, and a thinker of sideways thoughts. But I don't dance, can't sing, and my best artistic efforts fall short of your average notebook doodle. When you read my books, you are seeing me at my best.
My ultimate goal is to be both clever and right at the same time. I have it on good authority that I have yet to achieve it.
Through it all, though, I was always a storyteller. Eventually I started writing books based on the stray stories in my head, and people kept telling me to write more of them. Now, that's all I do for a living.
I enjoy strategy, worldbuilding, and the fantasy author's privilege to make up words. I am a gamer, a joker, and a thinker of sideways thoughts. But I don't dance, can't sing, and my best artistic efforts fall short of your average notebook doodle. When you read my books, you are seeing me at my best.
My ultimate goal is to be both clever and right at the same time. I have it on good authority that I have yet to achieve it.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
July 6, 2020
I read a lot of hard science, hard science fiction, books with ethical themes, and apocalyptic and dystopian stories so, in order to keep all the doom and gloom in perspective, something lighter is called for now and then. I stumbled upon J.S. Morin’s Mercy For Hire series and decided to give it a try.
According to his website, J.S. Morin “merges elements of classic fantasy with science fiction.” I’m not a fan of fantasy so these books were a stretch for me. However, a hero who travels the universe helping out the poor and downtrodden by administering vigilante justice via rocket travel and magic definitely sounded like a change of pace.
Esper is a hero in the tradition of Columbo, Inspector Clouseau, and Inspector Gadget - somehow always bumbling their way to a successful conclusion. With her faithful sidekick Kubu (seemingly a name play on Cujo), who is a huge extraterrestrial that has been magically downsized but still retains an enormous appetite, Esper sets out to right the wrongs of the universe.
Fortunately Esper is a first class wizard who is willing to break the wizard convention rules if it helps her clients and friends. So, she is constantly on the run from both bad guys and wizard enforcers. Of course none of her clients have enough to actually pay her salary so Esper is also always without funds.
This is my first contact with Morin and I must say that his writing is extremely entertaining. While his heroes and villains seem to have stepped right out of the comics his excellent and imaginative writing grabs you from the first paragraph. His descriptions of people, scenes, and issues immediately make you feel like you have known this universe all of your life.
“Her foot clipped someone’s forehead, eliciting a groan. “Sorry,” she whispered. It was one thing to crack a few heads in the heat of a brawl, but that didn’t mean Esper meant her adversaries any harm.” With three lines in the second paragraph you already know who Esper is and why you are going to enjoy following along on her adventures.
This book contains the first four of the twelve Mercy books. While each can be read separately, Esper’s story emerges as you go along so please read them in order.
Mercy for Hire books are not the best writing I’ve every come upon. Additionally the story lines are unbelievable, there are physics defying spaceships, and magic and wizards that are constantly popping up everywhere. No, these books are not anything deep or complex. They are, however, thoroughly entertaining, fun, and engaging. I’ll definitely be getting the Mission Pack 2.
According to his website, J.S. Morin “merges elements of classic fantasy with science fiction.” I’m not a fan of fantasy so these books were a stretch for me. However, a hero who travels the universe helping out the poor and downtrodden by administering vigilante justice via rocket travel and magic definitely sounded like a change of pace.
Esper is a hero in the tradition of Columbo, Inspector Clouseau, and Inspector Gadget - somehow always bumbling their way to a successful conclusion. With her faithful sidekick Kubu (seemingly a name play on Cujo), who is a huge extraterrestrial that has been magically downsized but still retains an enormous appetite, Esper sets out to right the wrongs of the universe.
Fortunately Esper is a first class wizard who is willing to break the wizard convention rules if it helps her clients and friends. So, she is constantly on the run from both bad guys and wizard enforcers. Of course none of her clients have enough to actually pay her salary so Esper is also always without funds.
This is my first contact with Morin and I must say that his writing is extremely entertaining. While his heroes and villains seem to have stepped right out of the comics his excellent and imaginative writing grabs you from the first paragraph. His descriptions of people, scenes, and issues immediately make you feel like you have known this universe all of your life.
“Her foot clipped someone’s forehead, eliciting a groan. “Sorry,” she whispered. It was one thing to crack a few heads in the heat of a brawl, but that didn’t mean Esper meant her adversaries any harm.” With three lines in the second paragraph you already know who Esper is and why you are going to enjoy following along on her adventures.
This book contains the first four of the twelve Mercy books. While each can be read separately, Esper’s story emerges as you go along so please read them in order.
Mercy for Hire books are not the best writing I’ve every come upon. Additionally the story lines are unbelievable, there are physics defying spaceships, and magic and wizards that are constantly popping up everywhere. No, these books are not anything deep or complex. They are, however, thoroughly entertaining, fun, and engaging. I’ll definitely be getting the Mission Pack 2.
March 25, 2021
Whish I could remember who suggested it. Might have been a FB ad or one of my friends. I am glad someone did. I read dark books. Science, mystery, Magic, western, and I have found another palette cleanser in this one. A fun book that doesn't bore you but has enough light and funny. Love it
June 7, 2026
Something a bit different, and I'm always looking out for that. A bounty hunter who is a self-described vigilante samaritan - she goes around helping people who need it, often a little bit outside the law. Yes, it's kind of like a supers story in some ways, or how a supers story should work if the vigilantism isn't tolerated by the authorities, but it doesn't feel that way. It's its own thing.
The worldbuilding is mostly off-the-shelf classic space opera: blasters (with a stun setting), FTL ships, alien races who look like anthropomorphic animals (turtles, monkeys, cats, wolves and dogs, probably a few others). Earth seems to be the center of a multispecies polity named ARGO, an acronym that is never defined (nor is it the only undefined acronym); there's the usual spectrum from civilized core worlds with sprawling megacities where, implausibly, trees are now rare to more-or-less anarchic and thinly settled frontier worlds, mimicking the 19th-century US in many ways. Because of the easy FTL, different planets feel more like states or countries. They're mostly Earthlike, more or less, either naturally or by terraforming, and their alienness is not very marked for the most part. It's set in 2562, and I found the differences and similarities to our present day moderately believable; it wasn't just the 21st century with interplanetary travel and blasters, though it also wasn't so vastly different as to feel alienating (or, to me, highly realistic, given the amount of change there's been in the past 500 years). It does make the common space opera mistake of referring to a constellation (Orion, in this case) as a "system," rather than realizing that constellations are just stars that happen to be in the same direction from Earth at widely varying distances, some of them being further from some of the others than they are from us.
Unlike the very classic style of space opera originating from the 1950s, there is a version of the Internet called the Omni. There are also wizards. These are people who have learned to convince the universe that their opinions about how things work override the normal laws of physics. The magic isn't Sandersonian - we don't know exactly what it can and can't do - so it can operate as a bit of a get-out-of-jail-free card, but its use is limited by two factors. First, it disrupts nearby tech, and wizards also find tech hard to use, which in a technological civilization is inherently a problem for them. Second, in the case of Esper, the specific wizard who's the protagonist, if she goes flinging too much magic around it will attract the attention of the powerful Conclave of Wizards, who are looking for her in an unfriendly manner.
One feature of the worldbuilding that was mostly done well was the made-up future pop culture. It always annoys me when, with some kind of feeble excuse or none at all, books set in the future have no pop culture references from after the time in which they're written. It's not that hard to make up something convincing, and these books do. The author occasionally fails to resist the temptation to use a joke name that's a present-day reference, though.
The worldbuilding feature I found hard (in fact, impossible) to swallow was that Christianity has reunited into the One Church, rather than continuing to split like a cheap pair of trousers every time someone gets overexcited. Apparently, the author hasn't been given the sects talk: "When one fanatic hates another fanatic very much..."
Part of Esper's backstory is that the One Church took her in at a difficult time of her life, and she even became a priestess (the idea that a woman can become a priest conflicts with the firmly old-fashioned viewpoint of the one priest we see). She later left, for reasons that aren't gone into much, and joined a mostly good-hearted group of criminals, from which she's now largely independent; this is where she learned wizardry. She fights, very effectively, using magic to enhance herself so that she can practice the wuxia-like martial arts of the four-handed monkey people's movies.
When she left, she took her sidekick Kubu with her. He's a sentient alien who looks very doglike, if a dog weighed 9 tonnes, and she has magicked him semi-permanently into the size of a very large but believable dog. It's repeatedly emphasized by both of them that he isn't a dog, but he thinks and behaves very like one, except that he's sentient. He's young, not yet an adult, and rather naive, and Esper tries, with limited success, to keep from exposing him to bad influences (given that she hangs out with criminals and other social outcasts on a regular basis).
This pack contains Esper's first four (documented) adventures. The first involves rescuing a poor little rich girl who is the subject of a custody battle between her parents, a retired pirate and his bitter, nasty wife. The 16-year-old girl is cynical and jaded, reminding Esper of herself at the same age, and she attempts to mentor her, with some eventual success.
In the second, Esper goes to a remote planet to hide out from the numerous people she's annoyed, and can't resist getting involved in helping a man who, as an offworlder, is being persecuted by the tight-knit supposedly-utopian community he has married into. She wants justice for him, but it's hard to obtain when everyone believes the insiders over the outsider.
In the third, Esper, still trying to hide out from the Conclave of Wizards and various other people, gets a job as security for a brothel, and goes all crusadey when one of the women who works there is trafficked to another planet by a gangster. She leaves Kubu behind for this one, and he has his own adventures. I found it disturbing in a few different ways, and genuinely suspenseful.
The fourth adventure starts with Esper still trying to avoid the Convocation, in an escalating series of confrontations which test her moral boundaries.
Finally, we have a short story which is entirely dispensable.
Apart from the final short, the complexity and tension of the challenges gradually ratchet up over the collection, which is good.
Apart from a bad habit of dangling modifiers and an occasional misplaced apostrophe when the noun is plural, and using "nonplussed" in the exact opposite sense to what it means, the author's mechanics are mostly good. That's refreshing to see, especially from a book I bought through BookBub. There's a bit more depth to the characters and their backstories than I often see, as well, and the protagonist is driven by a complex set of motivations, chiefly by wanting to do the right thing and protect the vulnerable and more-or-less innocent against the powerful and ill-intentioned. Operating on or beyond the edge of the law, she's in a morally complex position, and the author doesn't shy away from exploring that, or the darker thoughts that come to her when she's going vigilante. Her wins against socially embedded evil are, realistically, not absolute, but are big enough to be satisfying, and there are consequences for her when she defies something bigger than she is. The action scenes are good, too.
Overall, despite the mostly off-the-shelf and sometimes implausible worldbuilding and some missing polish, the character work and plotting are strong enough to almost (not quite) take it to five stars for me, and I'll watch out for more from this series and this author.
The worldbuilding is mostly off-the-shelf classic space opera: blasters (with a stun setting), FTL ships, alien races who look like anthropomorphic animals (turtles, monkeys, cats, wolves and dogs, probably a few others). Earth seems to be the center of a multispecies polity named ARGO, an acronym that is never defined (nor is it the only undefined acronym); there's the usual spectrum from civilized core worlds with sprawling megacities where, implausibly, trees are now rare to more-or-less anarchic and thinly settled frontier worlds, mimicking the 19th-century US in many ways. Because of the easy FTL, different planets feel more like states or countries. They're mostly Earthlike, more or less, either naturally or by terraforming, and their alienness is not very marked for the most part. It's set in 2562, and I found the differences and similarities to our present day moderately believable; it wasn't just the 21st century with interplanetary travel and blasters, though it also wasn't so vastly different as to feel alienating (or, to me, highly realistic, given the amount of change there's been in the past 500 years). It does make the common space opera mistake of referring to a constellation (Orion, in this case) as a "system," rather than realizing that constellations are just stars that happen to be in the same direction from Earth at widely varying distances, some of them being further from some of the others than they are from us.
Unlike the very classic style of space opera originating from the 1950s, there is a version of the Internet called the Omni. There are also wizards. These are people who have learned to convince the universe that their opinions about how things work override the normal laws of physics. The magic isn't Sandersonian - we don't know exactly what it can and can't do - so it can operate as a bit of a get-out-of-jail-free card, but its use is limited by two factors. First, it disrupts nearby tech, and wizards also find tech hard to use, which in a technological civilization is inherently a problem for them. Second, in the case of Esper, the specific wizard who's the protagonist, if she goes flinging too much magic around it will attract the attention of the powerful Conclave of Wizards, who are looking for her in an unfriendly manner.
One feature of the worldbuilding that was mostly done well was the made-up future pop culture. It always annoys me when, with some kind of feeble excuse or none at all, books set in the future have no pop culture references from after the time in which they're written. It's not that hard to make up something convincing, and these books do. The author occasionally fails to resist the temptation to use a joke name that's a present-day reference, though.
The worldbuilding feature I found hard (in fact, impossible) to swallow was that Christianity has reunited into the One Church, rather than continuing to split like a cheap pair of trousers every time someone gets overexcited. Apparently, the author hasn't been given the sects talk: "When one fanatic hates another fanatic very much..."
Part of Esper's backstory is that the One Church took her in at a difficult time of her life, and she even became a priestess (the idea that a woman can become a priest conflicts with the firmly old-fashioned viewpoint of the one priest we see). She later left, for reasons that aren't gone into much, and joined a mostly good-hearted group of criminals, from which she's now largely independent; this is where she learned wizardry. She fights, very effectively, using magic to enhance herself so that she can practice the wuxia-like martial arts of the four-handed monkey people's movies.
When she left, she took her sidekick Kubu with her. He's a sentient alien who looks very doglike, if a dog weighed 9 tonnes, and she has magicked him semi-permanently into the size of a very large but believable dog. It's repeatedly emphasized by both of them that he isn't a dog, but he thinks and behaves very like one, except that he's sentient. He's young, not yet an adult, and rather naive, and Esper tries, with limited success, to keep from exposing him to bad influences (given that she hangs out with criminals and other social outcasts on a regular basis).
This pack contains Esper's first four (documented) adventures. The first involves rescuing a poor little rich girl who is the subject of a custody battle between her parents, a retired pirate and his bitter, nasty wife. The 16-year-old girl is cynical and jaded, reminding Esper of herself at the same age, and she attempts to mentor her, with some eventual success.
In the second, Esper goes to a remote planet to hide out from the numerous people she's annoyed, and can't resist getting involved in helping a man who, as an offworlder, is being persecuted by the tight-knit supposedly-utopian community he has married into. She wants justice for him, but it's hard to obtain when everyone believes the insiders over the outsider.
In the third, Esper, still trying to hide out from the Conclave of Wizards and various other people, gets a job as security for a brothel, and goes all crusadey when one of the women who works there is trafficked to another planet by a gangster. She leaves Kubu behind for this one, and he has his own adventures. I found it disturbing in a few different ways, and genuinely suspenseful.
The fourth adventure starts with Esper still trying to avoid the Convocation, in an escalating series of confrontations which test her moral boundaries.
Finally, we have a short story which is entirely dispensable.
Apart from the final short, the complexity and tension of the challenges gradually ratchet up over the collection, which is good.
Apart from a bad habit of dangling modifiers and an occasional misplaced apostrophe when the noun is plural, and using "nonplussed" in the exact opposite sense to what it means, the author's mechanics are mostly good. That's refreshing to see, especially from a book I bought through BookBub. There's a bit more depth to the characters and their backstories than I often see, as well, and the protagonist is driven by a complex set of motivations, chiefly by wanting to do the right thing and protect the vulnerable and more-or-less innocent against the powerful and ill-intentioned. Operating on or beyond the edge of the law, she's in a morally complex position, and the author doesn't shy away from exploring that, or the darker thoughts that come to her when she's going vigilante. Her wins against socially embedded evil are, realistically, not absolute, but are big enough to be satisfying, and there are consequences for her when she defies something bigger than she is. The action scenes are good, too.
Overall, despite the mostly off-the-shelf and sometimes implausible worldbuilding and some missing polish, the character work and plotting are strong enough to almost (not quite) take it to five stars for me, and I'll watch out for more from this series and this author.
July 4, 2019
I'm always surprised at how prolific JS Morin is. While his books are usually not epics, the collected omnibus editions are equivalent to a larger volume. This series, which continues the adventures of Esper and Kubu from the Black Ocean / Mobius adventures, is another satisfying set of stories in the same universe.
The books are entertaining, and see some surprising developments. The last story (a bonus from the previous books 1-4) gives a brief preview of whats to come, and I'm looking forward to the next set of adventures from the (new-ish) crew.
The books are entertaining, and see some surprising developments. The last story (a bonus from the previous books 1-4) gives a brief preview of whats to come, and I'm looking forward to the next set of adventures from the (new-ish) crew.
May 23, 2020
Mercy for hire
Esper is a wizard a Kubu is a sentient canid and they travel together attempting to make the worlds a better place. Enjoyable.
Esper is a wizard a Kubu is a sentient canid and they travel together attempting to make the worlds a better place. Enjoyable.
March 2, 2021
My intro to the Black Ocean Universe and I thoroughly enjoyed it!
March 23, 2021
Another series that seems to have been written for me lol. Love these books
April 8, 2022
I think I'm done with this series. It bothers me. Something about the characters feels forced. I also really really don't like how they treat Kubu. He's an alien and because he looks like a dog they always treat him like a dog when around others. At one point he asks for a disguise so people will treat him with respect and let him do regular human things. The main character thinks about it for about a minute then decides no, because it'd just be easier for her if people thought he was a dog. Wtf. Kubu is like the jarjarbinx of this book. You feel sorry for him and want to help but he's also super annoying. So yeah, I don't think I can handle much more of this. That sucks cause I got the four book combo. Guess that was a waste of money.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews