Title: Shadow Ops:  Control Point
Author: Myke Cole
Published: 2012
ISBN-13: 9781937007249
Publisher: Ace (now Penguin Random House)
Twitter: @MykeCole
Publisher’s Blurb: Lieutenant Oscar Britton of the Supernatural Operations Corps has been trained to hunt down and take out people possessing magical powers. But when he starts manifesting powers of his own, the SOC revokes Oscar’s government agent status to declare him public enemy number one.

Shadow Ops:  Control Point is 1/3 in the Shadow Ops series.

“They want me to kill a child,” is the opening line in Shadow Ops:  Control Point, which just sucked me in.  That is a “wait, WTF is going on here” first line if I’ve ever read one.

And it just spins out of control, fast and furious from there.  Control Point blazes hot, and scorches anyone in its path.  It’s hard to keep track of what’s going on, and who’s doing what.  Oh, and who’s the bad guy … no wait … good … no wait …

Oscar Britton has the rug yanked out from beneath him too many times, and after a while it gets tiresome.  I feel sorry for the guy, he has to cope with so much immediate change it fucks with his decision making process at every turn.  Everything he thought he knew and a life time of training are called into question the second he manifests a magical power he doesn’t understand and is forbidden by the government.

All the flip-flopping isn’t necessarily Britton’s fault, he’s just written that way.  Honestly, it’s hard to have much faith in Britton, the government (contractor or otherwise), anyone who says they know how to help or fix things (except maybe for the token good guy Goblin called Marty).

At every turn, Britton is put in situations which cause him to question everything all at once, again.  It gets to be a bit much.  Maybe having a bomb implanted in his heart just causes Britton to make extremely bad decisions which lead to even more death and destruction until almost everything he’s come to depend on is gone, or dead.

And we, the readers, are left hanging in an unfinished story about a man in search of his own redemption.  Shadow Ops:  Fortress Frontier, here I come.