Review: Warrior Prince by Nancy J. Cohen

This is the first book in the Drift Lords series by Nancy J. Cohen.  The book opens up with Nira Larsen heading to the employment office of an amusement park just for adults called Drift World.  At this amusement park, you can role play any job you could possibly want.  Nira is applying for a job as a cosmetician.  But things start getting freaky when the woman holding the interview, Algie, can't get Nira to fall under her mind control spell and starts to take her hostage.  Just as Nira is panicking, a group of warriors break in and scare off Algie and her goons.  Then the building where she had the interview simply vanishes.  All Nira was looking for was a summer job to help finance her investigation into who her birth parents are and why they left her with a watch with Rune type writing on it that no one could read.  Now she is playing tour guide to a group of intergalactic warriors and wondering how she ended up caught in the middle.

Zohar is the leader of the Drift Lords, a group of Warriors dedicated to keeping the dimensional rifts that open naturally on Earth from being manipulated by the Trollecks.  Trollecks are creatures who were displaced from their dimension by humans and are not happy about it.  This time, the Trollecks have managed to get some kind of device that lets them manipulate the dimensional rifts and they are using them to not only gain mind slaves, but to try and bring down the Drift Lords.  As the crown prince of the Star Empire and leader of the last group of Drift Lords, it is his job to find the device, close the rifts and stop the Trollecks.

There was a lot going on with this book.  Between the dimensional rifts and spatial shifting, Phase rifles and dythium charges, Asgard and Ragnorok, if you don't stay on the top of your game and pay attention, you just might get lost.  Luckily between the research that I have personally done on Norse Mythology as well as my love of Science Fiction, I was able to mostly keep up.  But there were times that I would have to go back and reread sections just to make sure that I kept things straight.  I did really like the mixture of two such divergent topics and how the author made them work, but it is a lot to keep up with.  I felt that the story wasn't as tight and there were some holes here and there because so much time was spent on combining the scifi and mythology aspects into a believable story.

I am giving this book 3 stars on Goodreads. It was a good first book, we got introduced to the world, have the basic premise in place and are now track for the next book in the series.  My hope is the next book doesn't recover all the same ground.  It eats up a lot of pages explaining it and takes away from moving the plot forward.

When mythologist and Florida resident Nira Larsen accepts a job as tour guide for a mysterious stranger, she's drawn into a nightmare reality where ancient myths come alive and legendary evils seek to destroy her. To survive, she must awaken her dormant powers, but the only person who can help is the man whose touch inflames her passion.

After a dimensional rift in the Bermuda Triangle cracks open and an ancient enemy invades Earth, Zohar—leader of the galactic warriors known as the Drift Lords—summons his troops. He doesn't count on a redheaded spitfire getting in his way and capturing his heart. Nira has the power to defeat the enemy and to enslave Zohar's soul. Can he trust her enough to accomplish his mission, or will she lure him to his doom?