Out of the blue, a ship makes contact and it holds Supervisor Kalico Aguila, a formidable woman hell-bent on making her way to the top spot at The Corporation. She hopes to hit the ground running once her ship docks on Donovan, bringing back gold and jewels aplenty from the dangerous planet, but she is shocked to learn that it's been years since another ship has visited. She becomes determined to not only gain control over the rogue community, but also to discover what happened to those other ships that never returned to Earth. To help Aguila in her cause is Captain Max "Cap" Taggart, a razor-sharp marine who leads her troops, but his heart isn't in the game since he was sent to Donovan as sort of a punishment when a previous mission went awry. Also lurking on board is a cattle wrangler by the name of Dan Wirth, but in truth, that's not his name at all and he's not a cattle wrangler, but instead a cold-blooded psychopath who murdered the real Dan Wirth and got on board the ship to Donovan to get a fresh start, and hopefully with a whole planet of new victims.
To complicate matters further, right before the arrival of Aguila's ship, Tal Perez was involved in a quetzal hunt with her protege, Trish Monagan. After the quetzal got into camp and ate an infant, Tal and the deadly quetzal tangled a bit too closely during the hunt to bring the beast down. While Trish ended up killing the thing, it wasn't before it somehow "connected" with Tal and she is now convinced that she has a quetzal inside of her, which naturally causes her to exhibit some rather odd behavior, but she also now has heightened senses and abilities.
Although Aguila initially makes a strong show of force with the Port Authority denizens, she soon finds that they won't roll over so easily and she must make a decision whether to work with them or against them. But then one of the ghost ships finally arrives and with it comes a slew of questions about the fate of the crew. What's worse, Tal and Cap Taggart head out into the bush on a medical mission and their airship crashes in the process. Now these two very different people who really don't like each other at all have to work together to survive, with every creature on Donovan working against them. Good thing Tal has that quetzal inside of her.
In the meantime, a very different quetzal is establishing himself in the heart of Donovan in the form of Dan Wirth, and his scheming, coupled with the foolishness of a number of Donovanians, has caused a large part of the population to indenture themselves to him and his newly-formed casino. If Tal somehow is able to survive being stranded in the bush, what the heck will she return to in Port Authority?
Donovan is a good mystery with some tense action sequences to it, but there are a lot of characters (most of which I haven't named) and some have very peculiar names, so it can be hard to get them all straight as you progress. Personally, I found the character of Dan Wirth to grate on my last nerve, and I am sure that is the point, but he was offensive to me. Tal and Cap were interesting characters and were developed nicely, but I don't think they dragged me in quite as much as some other book characters have. Overall, Outpost is an entertaining way to kick off a series and I think a lot of the book was setting up the world and the characters within it. I'm not sure where it will go since there was some unresolved stuff at the end, which I wasn't crazy about, but the planet of Donovan is a wild place and I can see some unique adventures taking place there.
