I’ve watched Firefly and Serenity several times, so imagine my surprise when I stumbled across this book by Nancy Holder on Audible and realized there’s a whole series of Firefly novels I hadn’t realized existed.
The books take place between the series and the movie, so Wash is still alive and well. There are several callbacks to memorable moments of the show, which any Firefly fan will appreciate, and old characters, like Badger, make reappearances.
In fact, this book starts off with the crew on Persephone on Union Day, so, yes, they get involved in a bar fight, but this time it’s just Zoe and Jayne because Mal was lured outside of the bar and into a trap in which he gets drugged and kidnapped using his own stolen shuttle.
Zoe’s leg is badly injured in the course of the barfight and she and Jayne rescue a teenager who got in over his head in the fight, so Zoe assigns Jayne to take the kid home while Zoe tries to figure out what happened to Mal. When the trail goes cold, she contacts the ship to let them know that she can’t find Mal. They manage to get her back on the ship and Book volunteers to go looking for Mal.
Book ends up getting into some trouble of his own, but fortunately is rescued in the nick of time by an old friend of his.
In the end, they decide to send Inara, Sam, and River to help Book investigate what happened to Mal. Once they find out, they congregate back on the ship so they can fly to one of Persephone’s moons where Mal is being held on “trial” by an old friend of his.
As it turns out, Mal managed to really piss off one of his best friends from back home by sleeping with his girlfriend. Said friend, Toby, has held a grudge against Mal all these years so he decides to trump up some charges against Mal for conspiring with the Alliance during the war, which is of course complete bunk, but the Browncoats following Toby are half-crazed with a sense of having been wronged, so they go along with it.
Of course Zoe and friends show up just in time to save Mal and Toby and the rest get what’s coming to them.
Unfortunately, the cargo Badger gave them was so volatile they had to dump it before it blew up Serenity, which means they have to go without that payday.
Overall, I really enjoyed the plot and loved getting to hang out with these characters again. I’ll definitely be coming back for more.