After being removed from their homes as children, and enhanced biologically and cybernetically to become the ultimate soldiers, the Vanguards were released from duty after winning the the War of unification and struggled to find their place.

While Vanguard Strike by Jarom Strong, contains many common Sci-Fi tropes, the story is well executed. And while I am normally not a fan of Military Sci-Fi, this was a great story that does not get bogged down by military jargon. This will be a great read for those who enjoy stories about biological engineered beings, mercenaries and a well executed found family trope.

The narration by Jeff Harding was stellar. I had the opportunity to read the book and listen to the audiobook, and was able to seamlessly move between both with ease. Cannot wait to get to the next installment in this series.

Thank you Bookouture Audio, Second Sky, and NetGalley for the opportunity to listen to this ALC and Read the ARC. All opinions are my own.

Rating: 5 Stars
Pub Date: Jun 13 2025

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Jarom Strong (https://www.jaromstrong.com) is the author of three novels. Vanguard Strike was published a few days ago and is the first novel in his Paragon Space series. It is the 29th book I completed reading in 2025.

Opinions expressed here are unbiased and entirely my own! Due to scenes of violence, I categorize this novel as R.

Vanguards were taken from their homes as children. They were given cybernetic and biological enhancements, then wrapped in nearly indestructible armor. Developed by Paragon, they were the ultimate weapon on the battlefield. The force that finally brought the war of unification to an end. Then, they were not needed anymore, and Paragon released them from service. Most were lost without their military missions and became mercenaries.

Lackan VanDunn had been a Vanguard released after the war. He had knocked around, taking a variety of jobs. That was what put him in prison for the last eight years. He gets assigned a new cellmate, Rid. A kid in his late teens or early twenties. A little soft looking, but bearing the tattoo of the Scorcher gang.

Not too long later, an old friend, Nadus Torsund, contacts Lackan and offers him a job. Lackan turns him down at first, but after interrupting an attack on Rid, he changes his mind. Before long, the two have escaped following plans put in place by Torsund.

Lackan joins a team Torsund had put together for a space salvage job. Their target is the Revelation, a lost Paragon battlecruiser. Not only will they have to contend with the dangers of space but the ship they are heading to is known to have rippers aboard. Another Paragon product, the rippers were creatures with steel claws that only knew how to kill. Living weapons. Lackan had fought them before.

Before they even begin their journey to intercept the Revelation, Lackan and the salvage crew are attacked by assassins. Someone has found out about their planned salvage of the Revelation and wants them stopped. After a bloody battle, Lackan and crew make their way to the ship Orpheus and head to the coordinates for the Revelation. There, the real danger awaits them. But the information they might retrieve could save the galaxy.

I enjoyed the 9.5 hours I spent reading this 426-page science fiction novel. I like space opera, and this is a very good example of that genre. The story ends with plenty of loose threads for sequels. I like the chosen cover art. I give this novel a rating of 4.6 (rounded to 5) out of 5.

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It's a heist in space, with some emotional trauma thrown in! Plus, if you squint, you can see hints of Firefly and Starship Troopers. Fun for all!

This story is about Lax, who has been through some shit (to put it mildly) and has seemed to have given up. During the story we learn more about what happened and what motivates him now to take his second chance. In that, he's an interesting character, and I do love a healing character arc, but I think that felt a bit flat. He's started to take the first steps toward healing, but never really followed through with it. I will say that the recurring flashbacks of his trauma really intrigued me and I gasped when I realised what his trauma of 'green dots, flashing red' meant.

During the first bit of the book, the storylines from 8 years ago and present alternate. This is very clear at first, but later on the author is not consistent with this and sometimes announces the storyline from 8 years ago, and sometimes doesn't. While I can figure out what's going on and what timeline we're in, I do believe consistency is very important and I do wish every chapter with a different time from the previous chapter would have been announced.

It's clearly a sci-fi, but it's marketed as a military scifi and I just didn't feel that really fitted this book, mostly because Lax literally isn't military. Maybe that's nitpicking though, because the book is very action packed. Mostly direct action packed (shooting, stabbing and hitting), not a lot of tactical action that comes with space ship battles. I do prefer the latter, but I was invested in these battles nonetheless. It's also said to be a heist novel and I think it's not so much a heist as much as a salvage job. It does take a long ass time to get to actual the heist bit and I just didn't really care for/feel the stakes that much (though I understood why it was important for some of the team members, I personally didn't feel the stakes, which is why I'm not sure yet if I'll continue the series).

Considering the name of the person who hired some assassins, I figured out pretty quickly who was behind it. I did notice the foreshadowing later on, but it was just too obvious to have missed it imo. The reasons were made clear later on and I didn't guess those, so that kept me guessing!

I give it 3,5 stars, leaning more to the 4 stars here.

This story was okay.

It had a lot of generic sci-fi tropes, but few things that distinguish it. Even the primary villain/monster, just feels like a discount xenomorph.

It took a while for the story to get interesting. I never really got sucked into the story, and I felt that it just plodded along. The few exciting moments were brief and standard sci-fi action.

I’m giving it a 3. It is your average sci-fi action. Not bad, but not great.

Vanguard Strike: Paragon Space Book I hit shelves yesterday. This novel by Jarom Strong, the first of three in the series, takes place in a spacefaring future that's a little bit Warhammer, a little bit Gunbuster. Within this first installment, readers will travel from the horrors of the battlefield to a heist in nullspace.
Our hero is Lax, a former Vanguard: an enhanced super-soldier who, through a combination of metal implants and regularly-administered uppers and downers, fights for peace (albeit of a Helldivers sort, it seems) and for Paragon. When the war comes to an abrupt end, he finds eight years of reprieve with the love of his life and a lucrative job picking over ships as a "vulture." But when a job goes wrong, he'll lose everything and spend the next eight years behind bars.

This is where the story begins. An old friend and fellow former Vanguard offers to break Lax out of his 20-year sentence early. The catch? One last job. Instead of throwing fights for bets in prison, he can be part of a massive score. And the target is a big one: a Paragon battlecruiser, believed to be lost in the depths of nullspace. But even with a crack team at his disposal, the job is deadly on many levels.

While Vanguard Strike is great fun for fans of military sci-fi and heists, where it really shines is its unique depiction of PTSD. Lax's dreams of his lost love, the invading imagery of the day everything changed, and the peace he can find only from the medications he's become accustomed to all paint a very vivid picture of the difficulties of coping with trauma.

This is not a solely serious or depressing book, though. There's plenty of action, surprising moments of romance, and interesting and complex characters throughout. If you're ready for well-crafted sci-fi in a deeply developed world—and if you crave stories that value story and character above checking off a list of tropes—give this one a go.

Vanguard Strike is the first book in the military space opera series Paragon Space, written by Jarom Strong and published by Second Sky Books. A fast-paced and action packed heist esque story full of found family vibes while also examining the weight of the past, with a well-built world that remembers me a bit of the Halo series.

Lax was a Vanguard, a mutated soldier made to destroy; discharged after the Paragon won the war, he became a vulture until a disastrous run ended with his crew dying and him landing in a prison. Now, an old friend has contacted him for a new job; when the things in the prison get really hard for Lax, he decides to take the opportunity, embarking into a new adventure filled of violence, old friends and politics, bringing him close to the moment that broke his life. If the mission goes well, it will mean retiring in peace for the rest of their lives, but keeping all alive will be proven more difficult than they expected.

Lax, himself, is a really fine main character; well-layered, we get to know more about his past through flashbacks and nightmares. It is difficult to not empathize with his story, being a soldier used and thrown by the system, and you can see how he genuinely cares about the rest of the crew. They don't shine as much as Lax, but all of them are likeable in their way, from Rose, trying to get out of the shadow of her mother, to Artemis, following her father's dream; at the end, they are all together in an almost suicidal mission, so the bond between the group appears naturally.

As previously said, the notion of a big corporation enhancing and controlling super human soldiers gives me big vibes of the Halo saga, but with a more ambitious worldbuilding, as Strong takes the opportunity to develop the politics behind the space. The science part is really accessible, opting for a plainer language.
The pacing is fast, keeping you on the edge of your seat for most of the narration; however, I have to say that I found confusing how certain flashbacks are introduced without any time mark. Overall, still an enjoyable experience.

Vanguard Strike is a promising starter for an ambitious military space opera series; perfect if you are looking for an action packed proposal with a pinch of found family. I'm curious to see how the series continues from this first instalment, and luckily for me, the rest of the books are already published!

My rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️.75 (rounded up to 4)
Spice: 🚫


Reading this took a while, because the book was chonkyyy and I had to read on my phone since my kindle screen cracked (RIP 🪦).

I got the same vibes reading this military space drama as I did from watching the Halo tv series - soldiers having their emotions controlled by a governing entity. The pacing was pretty steady, so that helped keep me intrigued. I admit I love a good heist story!

Plot ——— Lax, modified ex-soldier, gets a second chance to leave his hell filled past behind him as he finds his skills in demand. But the past haunts him, and he's about to find himself in a deep hole. Fortunately, for his crew, after all he's been through, he's not leaving them behind. But who is going to save Lex from himself?


Book 1 of The Paragon Space trilogy - finished series.



Notable Tropes ——

🚀 Mercenaries
🚀 Found Family
🚀 Bioengineered Creatures
🚀 Genetic Alteration/Mutation
🚀 Heists
🚀 Space setting/Military Space Drama


Thank you to SecondSky for this ARC, and the opportunity to read and review.

Taking me right out of my comfort zone, Vanguard Strike left me pleasantly surprised and itching to jump into book 2 straight away!

I was obsessed from the opening chapters and found myself racing through chapters. It's so good!!

Packed with action from the off, Vanguard Strike is an exciting space opera that takes us through events of the past and present with Lax, as he regales of time spent in the Vanguard Elite, to being captive and transformed into a super soldier.

An enjoyable and entertaining read.

Vanguard Strike is an awesome sci-fi adventure! It's action packed with a likeable reluctant and Tortured hero, an excellent crew of supporting characters, and a big bad enemy behind galaxy domination and a deadly biological engineered space monster!

As the crew work toward the riskiest job known to man, we get insight into our hero's passed as he tries to avoid his heartbreak.
The 2nd part of the book has so much tension and excitement, that I devoured 70pgs per hour, reading 50% in one evening.

10/10 recommend.

In this military space opera thriller, we follow a genetically and cybernetically enhanced super soldier after he was discharged, imprisoned, and then rescued to join a crew to pull off one last big job.

Lackan VanDunn, nicknamed Lax, was sold by his parents to the Paragon government and their Divinity corporate backers, as a child for the Vanguard soldier program, where he became one of the faceless super soldiers that united humanity, by force, and against the will of most of the people outside of the Paragon. Then in the final war, for the planet Brahmin, the Paragon discharges their Vanguard as a sign of goodwill and disarmament.

We’re left to guess as what happens between that and when the story starts, which features Lax as a chief contestant in a prison fighting contest, making money for his boss by manipulating the odds. Lax isn’t immortal, but he’s bigger, faster, stronger, tougher, and heals faster than a normal human being. By all rights, Lax should be the one running the gang, but he’s emotionally broken and reliant on a chemical used by the Paragon to control their puppets, as people call them.

He is then broken out by an old war buddy and recruited for a mysterious job. We learn that after the war, he started working salvage because of his experience fighting the rippers.

Rippers are the bestial counterpart to the Vanguard—bioengineered monsters whose only instincts are to kill. Not very smart, they are tough, vicious, feast on human flesh, and have a tendency to haunt the derelict ships left over from the war. And yeah, they’re created by the same company that created the Vanguards.

There are some definite *Firefly* vibes here, with the corporate-government partnership that rules the ‘verse, human-eating monsters lurking in the void of space, and desperate crews trying to pull off one last job and settle down. I really appreciated the grimier approach to the setting, and some of the thought-out implications of the worldbuilding (one of the characters has never been on a planet before and suffers agoraphobia the first time).

It’s much more high-tech than *Firefly*, however. I’d put it as being pretty squarely in the typical space opera type established by *Halo.* Actually, the Vanguards remind me a lot of the Spartans.

So, the overarching plot is this last salvage job, of a ship so secret that the crew finds themselves targeted by assassins who seem be tracking them to prevent them from reaching the ship, then working with a guerilla resistance movement who hates Lax because of his role in their world’s conquest.

There’s a solid little training montage which was a nice homage to the trope, as Lax tries to turn the two groups into a cohesive team capable of salvaging a ripper-infested ship. Even as he’s attempting to do this, however, he’s getting flashbacks from the last job that landed him in prison after everything went wrong, wiping out his entire crew.

The similarity between the two grew more notable over time, both to the reader and to Lax, which was very interesting to see it play out. Lax wasn’t just trying to accomplish this mission, he was trying to resolve the problems from his last job that still haunted him.

The final act of the story is every bit as explosive as expected from a story with this set up, with some excellent twists, self-realizations, and, overall, a very satisfactory ending. I won’t spoil any of it, because the mystery element really kept me intrigued.

Overall, the plot was not the most complex or original. For a military space opera like this, I didn’t expect it to be. Fundamentally, this is a heist-story mixed with a spy story. At heart, however, it’s a story about grief and consequences.

And Strong handles this story very well. It was the characters that really carried the story for me. They were all complex, none of them seemed trustworthy, and half of the mystery was just unraveling the conflicting motivations and true intentions, and coping with what happened. Lax’s reliance on frigicern to numb his emotions was a nice example of addiction as a coping method and gave a strong visual indicator of his inner changes, charted along with his relationship to the other members of the salvage team.

4/5 Stars

Recommended for anyone looking for an exciting and heartfelt space opera adventure.

*Vanguard Strike* releases on June 13, 2025 and can be ordered at [this link](https://bookshop.org/a/111998/9781835258347) (my [Bookshop.org](http://Bookshop.org) affiliate link).

This was really good. I had such a fun time. It was giving Halo vibes (the TV show, I've never played the game - don't have an Xbox) which was perfect because I've recently finished the show and was looking for something to fill the void. I enjoyed the characters, getting the back story of Lax as well as what was going on current day. The parallels of his life past and present we're super interesting. I'm excited to continue the series when the rest of them come out.

I haven’t delved into science fiction in a good few years, which was an awful decision as I must have missed so many good books. This book has single handedly refreshed my love for scifi. It’s all things Star Wars, halo and guardians of the galaxy.
With a tight knit found family that come together to perform a heist on a missing space ship, an ex exo skeleton solider who was broken out of prison and so so much more.

This is definitely an author I want to read more from.
There is depth and character development in this book that I wasn’t expecting and it really made this an amazing book.
Thank you for the eARC second sky and net galley.

I have just concluded my perusal of Jarom Strong's "Vanguard Strike: Paragon Space Book I, being published by Second Sky (who graciously provided me with an ARC). The book is being marketed as military science fiction, but includes significant elements of other genres as well. It is not, for example comparable to the Honor Harrington series of the Lost Fleet Series. The characters are well drawn and offer fairly deep backstories, but for some reason, perhaps because I have an affinity for epic fleet level engagements with significant tactical, technical and strategic development the story left me somewhat cold. There is significant action and a good bit of mystery surrounding some of the characters and events, but overall it simply didn't push all of my buttons. Still, for those of you not as hung up on the details of operational military doctrine and employment as I am, the book is not without its charm. I think that it might appeal particularly to some of the same folks who enjoy murder mysteries, and many young adults might find it refreshingly devoid of what they might think of as excessive military detail. Ah well, to each his or her own. Most general collections might benefit from this book since it offers something for anyone with a general interest in the area of science fiction..

Vanguard Strike is an action-packed military space opera. I could not stop reading this book. The stakes are high!
I loved the main character, the modifications he was dealing with, his ability to fight and build a team. An absolutely brilliant cast of characters are brought together, the found family trope is well done. I also loved the more tender moments and connections explored.
The heist itself is exciting and intense. Even though it’s sci-fi I felt very grounded throughout and the world made sense. It’s not overly complex but at the same time it’s vast.
If you like lots of action, shooting, some gore and high stakes this is a book for you. I will definitely be continuing with this series as I am so invested in these characters.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for this advanced reader copy. This is a voluntary review of my own thoughts.

Thank you so much to the publisher for sending me an advance listeners copy! I DEVOURED this book! Think Firefly - space, mercenaries, found family, people thrown together, and so much more.

Between the character development to the universe itself, this story is so well crafted I immediately wanted to read this authors entire bibliography only to find out this is his first novel. What a banger of a first novel. I was engrossed in this story from the start.

I don’t want to say more for fear it’ll spoil something.

4 ⭐️

Thank you kindly to Second Sky for inviting me and sending me a widget of Jarom Strong’s debut novel, Vanguard Strike.

I’ll admit, I haven’t read much sci-fi before, but this was a lot of fun. The world-building is strong without being overwhelming, and the pacing kept me hooked from the start. I really liked the idea of salvagers scavenging old battlecruisers; it felt fresh and exciting. There’s a good balance of action and quieter moments, and while I didn’t always feel fully connected to the characters, I was invested in what happened to them.

A solid debut with lots of promise, especially if you’re after something action-packed with just the right amount of grit. Definitely worth checking out if you’re dipping your toes into sci-fi for the first time.

Overall, Vanguard Strike is an engaging debut that offers a thrilling ride through a richly imagined universe.

4.5 Stars rounded up. Sci-fi, heist and action filled space thriller. It took me a little bit to get into this book, but about a third of the way through the initial chapters made sense, and the story took off. Lax, modified ex-soldier, gets a second chance to leave his hell filled past behind him as he finds his skills in demand. But the past haunts him, and he’s about to find himself in a deep hole. Fortunately, for his crew, after all he’s been through, he’s not leaving them behind. But who is going to save Lex from himself. Start of a series, and an introduction to number of characters who are fun to spend time with. Lex certainly comes to think that. Thank you to Second Sky and NetGalley for the ARC. The views expressed are all mine, freely given.

Vanguard Strike by Jerom Strong was such a good read! The plot features a heist—which I freaking love—and it’s sci-fi space opera at its finest. Fast-paced, action-packed, and full of heart, this book had me hooked from page one.

The main character? Absolutely lovable. I adored him! There were both heartwarming moments and nail-biting scenes that kept me turning the pages. The worldbuilding is smooth and easy to grasp, making this a perfect pick for someone new to sci-fi.

A fantastic blend of thrills and feels—I enjoyed this so much. Huge thanks to Second Sky Books and NetGalley for the ARC!

First off a big thank you to the publishers Second Sky an Bookouture as well as to the author Jarom Stong , and Netgalley, for the invite to read Vanguard Strike , I'm so glad I've finally got to it even though it's a bit late ,it was no stop actin from the start and I loved how I got really creepy out when ever the bioengineered creatures known as rippers came into play because ever time they showed up there was this little vice in the back of my head saying just because their in a story doesn't mean someday they can't be real because everyday science advances. I also loved how even though this was the author's debut novel it didn't give off that feel at all , in fact the way he told the story give the feel like he had been written for a long time .