Review of "The Tempest Fury" by Ingrid Moon

Score: 94+/100 (9.4+ out of 10)

The Tempest Fury is the highly-anticipated third installment in the stellar Saxon Saga series by Ingrid Moon!

Ingrid Moon has established The Saxon Saga as one of our favorite series in the history of our contests! Come to think of it, it's arguably our favorite sci-fi series as far as OCA goes. What makes this series so great are the likable, charismatic, and cool main characters: Turner Boone, a brilliant but broken teen strategist with a brain wired for war games, and Elyon, a deadly Saxen assassin who is equal parts weapon and wounded soul. Their bond and connection is unmistakable. While this isn't a traditional romance, you can feel the tension, desire, chemistry, and attachment between these two. It radiates from the pages like the rays of a star.

Then you add the super intriguing villainous and/or morally gray characters like Vindik, Chelani, and Reia PLUS conflicted characters like Admiral Weden and Greming—those are some ingredients for a compelling character drama recipe!

We can't emphasize this enough: we really felt for these characters, particularly Boone and Elyon. A lot of times, we read books with these really flat characters who seem just as bored to be in their books as we are whilst reading them. That's not the case with Ingrid Moon books, especially the Saxon Saga. These characters are lively, motivated, emotional, and animated. They all seem to be after something. Even someone like Weden—not even a super central character—is still rich with inner conflict, torn between loyalty to the Coalition, loyalty to her crews, and the creeping realization that the people she serves are not who she thought they were.

And, of course, there was Greming in the previous book who was both complicit and remorseful for Vindik's crimes, a character motivated to make amends and find redemption.

That's something else we appreciated about these books and this series: they don't forget their continuity. Characters don't just come and go. They don't just appear and are forgotten about. The actions and influences of characters from previous books, like Vindik, Greming, Chelani, and Reia are still felt.

Speaking of Chelani... Chelani, in the previous book, was more of an enigmatic background figure—the mysterious "client" who seemed to be sabotaging Boone. In a sense, he was a bit of a phantom menace, to borrow a Star Wars term. Well, Chelani is front and center in this book as its principal villain.

He has BIG shoes to fill considering that Vindik was such a menacing and imposing villain in book one, so much so that his influence was still strongly felt in book two. Chelani is a different kind of villain. While Vindik was big, powerful, and intimidating, Chelani is more a schemer and a manipulator.

In other words, while Vindik was more like Thanos or Darth Vader—someone who is just going to try to overwhelm and control you with shear might and power—Chelani is more like Loki or Palpatine/Darth Sidious, someone who is going to ensnare you in a web of lies and blackmail.

Chelani is one of the seven chairmen of the Coalition, but he isn't the head chairman, not yet... That role is filled by Prime Chair Temten, Chelani's political rival. Chelani is actually a little bit like Loki in the sense that, while also being a Machiavellian mischevious-maker, he has a huge chip on his shoulder due to his lineage. This is due to the expectations piled on him as scion of the Chelani family. Temten and the other Chairs still treat him as an ambitious upstart rather than the rightful center of power. Everything about Eritrissere, his family’s ringworld estate with its immaculate vineyards and carefully staged pageantry, feels like a monument he is building to prove that the name Chelani belongs at the top. That mix of insecurity and brilliance makes him one of those villains who is dangerously competent yet uncomfortably human. You never quite root for him, but you always understand how he got this way, and every scene he shares with Boone, Elyon, or Weden crackles with tension.

In terms of story, this book might have our favorite setup yet. Boone is reeling from the fallout of Nightfire, drowning in guilt and grief, and basically trying to disappear on the Makellan. Instead, he winds up back in the game, quietly hustling high level strategy matches as the mysterious “Nova” until both a crime boss and the League Intelligence Bureau catch his scent. The League scenes are especially riveting. Watching this shell shocked teenager sit at a table with generals and analysts, calmly unpacking Chelani’s moves and fleet doctrine while his own mind is fraying from the multiplex “grooves,” is tense and heartbreaking at the same time. On the other side of the war, Elyon has more or less sold herself to Chelani, living and working on his ringworld estate, Eritrissere, training his marines and biding her time as she plots how to protect Boone and eventually hit Chelani where it hurts.

We really appreciated how much this volume leans into the political and intelligence thriller aspects of the setting. Chelani’s ringworld is more than a cool sci fi backdrop. It is a symbol of his power and legacy, the place where he plays at being benevolent patriarch while quietly building weapons, patronage networks, and the groundwork for a coup. Admiral Weden is trapped in that gravity well, trying to follow orders and protect her people while suspecting she is helping to crown a tyrant. The League is not exactly pure either. They are quick to see Boone as a useful tool. There is something chilling about the way they discuss him as an asset at the same time they are swearing to protect him. That moral murkiness keeps the stakes grounded.

Elyon probably delivers the single most powerful emotional turn in the book. Without spoiling specifics, there is a stretch in which grief almost breaks her. For a while, she goes numb. Then all that pain crystalizes into fury, and she chooses one target, one man, to hold responsible. The resulting operation on Eritrissere, with the Makellan running interference while Elyon turns herself into the literal tempest tearing through Chelani’s sanctuary, is one of the most cathartic and cinematic sequences in the series. Her later confrontation with Reia about who really owns her loyalty is equally strong. It is the moment Elyon stops being just a weapon in other people’s hands and starts choosing how she will be used, and by whom.

If we have a small critique, it is that the middle can feel dense at times. That's something we noticed about all three of the books in the series: they really meander and weave around in their middle-sections. It's also pretty complicated and overly-complex at times. Chelani alone has like three or four different plans that he's enacting either simultaneously, consecutively, or concurrently: the assassination plot, the Scotli terraforming beam superweapon, Elyon as a biological weapon, using the CN fleets and maneuvering his slow coup against Temten, etc. The guy is always scheming.

There are a lot of acronyms, ship classes, and moving parts, and some of the war room and briefing scenes go deep on fleet composition and political positioning. For us, the payoff is worth it because the big moves in the third act make sense and hit harder. However, readers who are mainly here for fistfights, dogfights, or saber duels might occasionally wish the story would hurry back to Boone, Elyon, and the Makellan blowing things up. That said, if you enjoy the “spy novel in space” flavor of science fiction, this is where The Tempest Fury really shines.

Oh, and we finally figure out why—after all this time—Boone is such a masterful strategist at such a young age, something which always seemed weird to us.

It turns out that Boone is an auton, a motherless biologically-enhanced hybrid who was engineered to essentially be a chess engine—or, in this case, an appote master (appote is the Coalition's military strategy game akin to chess mixed with Battleship). This explains why Boone is so unbeatable at appote and why he's a strategist so sought-after that he commanded his own floatilla fleet and was heavily recruited by Vindik and others. So, now it makes sense! Finally!

What's extra special about this is that it provides another way in which Boone and Elyon are similar and kindred spirits. Both are, in their own ways, lab-built weapons who were shaped, used, and hurt by powerful institutions long before they ever had a say in their own lives. Boone was engineered to think and calculate, Elyon was trained and tortured to fight and kill, and both have to figure out what it means to be a person rather than a tool. That shared origin in trauma and manipulation makes their quiet moments of care, loyalty, and stubborn affection for each other hit even harder.

Check it out on Amazon!