backwards thinking

I wasnt impressed. The tactics utilized are. idiotic at best. Early in the ship battle he mentions torpedo tubes, but then never uses them. The so called honorable commander keeps his crew and himself at general quarters living on stims for days at a time with apparently no degradation of their performance, unless you count the complete lack of tactical thinking throughout the book as a result of this stupidity. As pointed out by another reviewer the main characters are generic and almost carbon copies of each other. Besides all that the author seems not only to have his characters commit atrocities, and to do things detrimental to morale and the lives of their crews, but he seemingly whole heartedly endorses their actions. If this is his notion of a good commander he's obviously never spoken to a real service member. To top it all off he's very generic in his physics concept, and the ships are bland and unremarkable aside from their size. All in all the premise and the execution of the plot was mediocre at best.
The narrator made the women sound like men with bad accents.

53 people found this helpful

Slow slow slow

I can appreciate character building but something has to happen at some point to hold your interest. I made it 3hrs without much happening. There are so many better titles. I'm asking for a refund I couldn't finish tho one.

32 people found this helpful

Don't waste your money.

The lost fleet series was way better than this! I found this to be very repetitive and boring.

14 people found this helpful

Similar to many other plots

Luke Daniels is a great narrator; here, however, his female voices were uncertain. It was hard to remember that the 3 women in the story actually were women because they didn't sound like women.

There are some space opera tropes that need to end now. All are present in this book:
1. The use of old Roman/Latin names for military titles and people's names. We rarely use them now; do you think a thousand years in the future people will have reverted to them?
2. The name Kat for a female ship captain. There seems to be some attraction male authors have to this name, as if it makes her both sexy and strong at the same time.
3. The name Dauntless for the main ship. Seriously, every single space tale has a Dauntless.
4. The fact that a warrior people who value honor over all and never surrender, never retreat are always the bad guys.
5. Ship captains who read history, sometimes (but not here) from real paper books and using real eye glasses. Let's leave that one with Kirk and Picard.

Actually the reading of history may be a valid literary symbol, so maybe #5 isn't so bad after all. In this story, it implies that we will continue to repeat our mistakes because no one does read history. This was the most interesting aspect I encountered, yet it was subtle and easily missed.

This story presents 3 civilizations, the Alliance, The Union, and the Confederation. Only 2 of them end up being important in this part of the saga. It is hard to know who is who, especially when the Marines are trying to take a planet and are met with strong resistance. We don't know whose Marines they are, and which side the planetaries are on. This fight should have been one we cared about and cheered for, but it never caught interest. This is a shame because most Marines stories are real chest-thumpers.

It was also difficult to know who was to be the hero and who the bad guy. This was confusing, but actually quite true to life since every soldier on both sides is the good guy to his mother and his comrades. And it allowed us to mourn the defeat and death of the enemy.

There were only 3 people we really cared about, Captain Kat, Captain Tyler Baron and Sam. It took a long time for us to choose which captain to root for. If that was the point, it is so subtle, and so thinly developed for most people to care about, and just causes confusion. There was some real emotion there, and some sincere reflection into motivations, duty, honor, and courage. Those provided the morals to the story. The action was pretty good at the end, the actual duel in the dark. However, this book does not captivate me enough for me to read the next installment.

13 people found this helpful

Not bad, if only tactics, timing and technology we

Not bad, if only tactics, timing and technology were actually applied to the story...but I'll keep reading the series...

9 people found this helpful

Wasted my time

Book felt long and drawn out. Not sure where to place the blame, on the author or narrator. Story line had potential. forced myself to dredge through 6 hours always it’s going to pick up and suck me into it and it never happened.

3 people found this helpful

The story was good, but very predictable

When you have read as many "good vs evil" books and seen as much scifi as I have, a predictable plot is annoying.

That was ok here because it was a good, well written story in spite of this fact.

What really grated on my nerves was Allan's choice of having all military persons, no matter whose thoughts within any of the four cultures' militaries were being presented, used the word "comrades" in the narration of their thoughts to identity their fellows in arms. This wouldn't be a big issue if he hadn't used the term dozens upon dozens of times.

For four cultures so different and with such lack of knowledge about each other, it seemed like a very obvious bit of laziness within an otherwise good book for him to use that term ad nauseam. It cheapened the book for me.

1 person found this helpful

Damn entertaining

3 main powers struggling for control of star systems. at first the story line switches between the factions. I was working on a project as I listened so it took me a second to catch up as he shuffled from the view of one faction to the next setting the stage. Then the action starts and I couldn't stop listening!

1 person found this helpful

No good guys, no bad guys, just opposing sides

Would you consider the audio edition of Duel in the Dark to be better than the print version?

I have no idea, I like audio or voice versions of books.

What other book might you compare Duel in the Dark to and why?

Hard to say......these review choices they give you sort of try to lead your review vs just letting you tell what you think.

Have you listened to any of Luke Daniels’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

I like Luke Daniels, his narration is what lead me to this book.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No, I use it at night to help me sleep but this book will keep you as you want to know what happens next.

Any additional comments?

I really this book. It is mature military space drama that does a good just of describing the differing view points of a conflict. You will will really like this if you are tired of last ditch aliens attack, humans against the universe stuff that saturates the audio books now days. The ending felt rushed but the book was so solid that is a minor issue...sort of. Sometimes things do not go as we want, but I enjoyed the listen.

2 people found this helpful

Started slow but finished really well.

Shades of "The balance of terror" STOS, but good enough for me to look for the next in the series.

2 people found this helpful