Roger MacBride Allen BSI Starside: Death Sentence

BSI Starside: Death Sentence

Roger MacBride Allen

Bantam, June 2007, $6.99, 446 pp.

ISBN: 0553587277

The Bureau of Special Investigations (BSI) located on the planet Center has just recovered their spaceship The Adler and the body of their missing twenty-five year old agent Trevor Wilcox after having been missing for six months. Wilcox died of old age and nobody has an explanation for that. He was on a courier mission to Metran to collect a document to bring back to the BSI diplomatic office.

The powers that be have found the file but it is encrypted and they don't know where Trevor hid the key to decrypt it. The document is designated Won-Starter which means something catastrophic could happen to humans or another race. Agents Jamie Mendez and Hannah Wolfson are sent to Metran to search for the key, but the planet is on the verge of revolution. It has one of the shortest lived species in the universe but one of its citizens had found a way to extend their life span. The file, which is only the one in existence, tells how to do it but the leaders fear change and the general population has started rioting to make the research available so their lives could be extended. The two agents also have to deal with a psychotic member of the Xenoatrics, the Unseen Race who is working against the Metran race and the humans to protect their planetary side Enclave, which means killing anyone who can decrypt the file.

BSI STARSIDE: DEATH SENTENCE is space opera at its finest especially the futuristic space chases where it looks like the human agents and their ship will be destroyed. Readers will empathize with the Metran people who want to live longer than their forty years but their leaders fear change so much that they will risk a collapse of their civilization rather than help the agents find the key. Jamie and Hannah get a deep look at the Metran culture when they are on the planet and so does the reader.

Harriet Klausner