Death on a Cold Planet picks up where Lieutenant Shaw left off, but the books can be read independently of each other.
In this Book Eight in the Astrid Amundsen series, Lieutenant Downs continues his account of events on the USS Bunker Hill before Astrid joined the squad.
Downs’s commitment to do everything possible to protect Lieutenant Blake and Lieutenant Shaw comes into sharp focus, and his chances of success in that undertaking appear remote.
In Death on a Cold Planet, the Bunker Hill and A-Squad pursue a distress signal from the Aurora, a US ship that disappeared about twenty years earlier. This book takes A-Squad on a faster-than-light hop to a planet in a different solar system, where a simple ground-party excursion turns into a life-and-death struggle, in which no one’s survival is guaranteed.
In the course of its events, the book is a portrayal of Lieutenant Maureen Shaw’s repeated courage in the face of danger, and her stoic or even positive attitude in the face of high risk and uncertainty. More significantly, it delineates her willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice to save a friend.