Dragon and Herdsman

By Timothy Zahn
Rating: 4 1/2 stars
Reviewed by Noelle

This is the 4th installment in the Dragonback series. Anyone wanting to read a thrilling, fast-paced scifi tale will enjoy picking up a book in this series. 14 year old Jack Morgan has been raised as a thief by his Uncle Virgil from the age of 3, but then he ends up meeting Draycos, the member of a dragon-like alien race called the K'da, whose people are being brutally exterminated. Draycos is a warrior-poet, and he forms a symbiotic relationship with Jack. Soon Jack is reforming his ways, but both are on the run from the authorities who are determined to kill or capture them before the pair can expose the genocide. In this book, Jack and Draycos pick up Alison, a girl they met in a previous adventure. They bring her to an out of the way world to meet friends, but find mercenaries hot on their tail. The planet they land on also holds a surprise--Phookas, who are a more primitive version of the K'da. Soon Jack, Draycos and Alison are stuck on the planet, trying to evade the mercenaries while also saving the Phookas from certain extinction. Could the Phookas become full-fledged K'da? There is a lot of action and adventure as the group tries to outrun and outwit their enemies, and a great plot twist at the end, with the set up for the next book in the series, Dragon and Judge, due out in 2007.