MarzAat

Review: Operation Norway, William Meikle, 2019.

I approached this one with some trepidation when I heard mountain trolls were the monster the S Squad faces this time. Was Meikle simply going to give us a version of the movie Trollhunter with Scottish commandoes?

I needn’t have worried. It was another of Meikle’s suspenseful S-Squad stories.

The squad is sent to Norway to sterilize traces of a joint Norwegian-British scientific project done after WWII lest it now prove politically embarrassing.

But, on the shores of a fjord, they find the project to create supersoldiers for the Cold War has left a living legacy. Meikle has an interesting science fictional explanation for the monster in this adventure. As with the previous S Squad installment, Operation: Loch Ness, we also get a sympathetic monster.

There’s a quite surprising change of location about two-thirds of the novel showing Meikle continues to inject a lot of novelty into the formula for this series.

More than most of the S Squad stories, this one deals with military honor and the soldier’s duty to his comrades. It’s also more emotionally affecting at the end than the usual S Squad story. Soldiers aren’t just trained killers. They have ties to the outside world and their families like all of us.

The Sci-Fi and Fantasy Reviewer provides the parallax on this one.