Format: 280 pages, ebook
Release Date: August 10, 2025
Publisher: NYLA
Source: Amazon
Genre: Science Fiction / Fantasy
We are at war. The interdimensional invasion brought us unimaginable suffering, but it also awoke talents slumbering deep within us, a means to repel and destroy our enemy. Every day new gates open, leading to breaches filled with monsters and valuable resources. If you are a Talent, your country needs you. The world needs you. Be the hero you were born to be.
Adaline is a Talent. Ten years ago, she had a happy marriage and a job she loved. The invasion shattered both. Now she works for the government, searching the breaches for magic metals and medicine to help Earth repel an interdimensional enemy. Two kids, one cat, bills, benefits, mortgage and school tuition...Risking her life became routine.
She had gone into the dimensional gates hundreds of times. She was always well protected. This time everything goes wrong. Now Ada is trapped in the labyrinth of alien caves unlike any other. Her only companion is a scared German Shepherd named Bear. Together they must uncover the breach's secrets and escape, because Ada promised her children that she will come home.
The future of humanity depends on it.
Adaline is a Talent. Ten years ago, she had a happy marriage and a job she loved. The invasion shattered both. Now she works for the government, searching the breaches for magic metals and medicine to help Earth repel an interdimensional enemy. Two kids, one cat, bills, benefits, mortgage and school tuition...Risking her life became routine.
She had gone into the dimensional gates hundreds of times. She was always well protected. This time everything goes wrong. Now Ada is trapped in the labyrinth of alien caves unlike any other. Her only companion is a scared German Shepherd named Bear. Together they must uncover the breach's secrets and escape, because Ada promised her children that she will come home.
The future of humanity depends on it.
The Inheritance is the first installment in author Ilona Andrews' Breach Wars series. If you read the introduction to this story, you will get a laugh. What was initially supposed to be a novella ended up being a longer story with the likelihood of a sequel. This story revolves around two very different characters: Adaline Moore and Elias McFeron. In a world forever scarred by an interdimensional invasion a decade prior, humanity clings to survival amid daily breaches: unstable portals that spew forth monstrous threats but also yield precious resources, such as magic-infused metals and life-saving medicines.
These rifts have awakened "Talents" in select individuals—enhanced abilities that turn ordinary people into reluctant heroes, conscripted to probe the unknown for the greater good. Enter Adaline "Ada" Serrano, a 42-year-old single mother and seasoned Talent evaluator working government contracts. Once blissfully married with a fulfilling career, Ada's life imploded with the invasion, leaving her juggling two kids, a sassy cat, mounting bills (orthodontic braces don't come cheap), and the grind of high-risk jobs that pay the mortgage but demand her soul.
Ada is an Assessor Talent - she can look around a space and spot the usefulness of everything in it (like, she sees them glow in colors - yellow is dangerous, red is useful). Additionally, she can look at an object and immediately know its use (for example, this plant will yield a highly advanced medicine, this ore is unbreakable). Ada's routine dive into a breach goes catastrophically awry: a cave-in separates her from her team, stranding her deep within an alien labyrinth of twisting tunnels, bioluminescent fungi, and predatory beasts whose saliva burns like battery acid.
Her sole companion? Bear, the team's loyal but terrified German Shepherd, whose training in a language Ada barely remembers, becomes their lifeline. What follows is an odyssey of survival, where Ada must navigate not just the physical perils of this otherworldly maze but also the unraveling secrets of the breach itself—secrets that could tip the scales in humanity's war. Woven throughout are flashbacks to Ada's pre-invasion life and tense glimpses into the broader geopolitical machinations of Talent guilds and governments, all underscored by her ironclad promise to her kids: she'll make it home, no matter the cost.
Bear steals scenes as Ada's four-legged co-pilot, evolving from a panicked liability into a fiercely intuitive partner. Their bond—forged in shared terror and improvised commands—adds layers of warmth and tension, with the dog's peril hitting harder than any human drama. Elias is an interesting a character, though we got less of him in this book, which was understandable.
This is Ada's story. Elias mostly had to sit on his butt and fume about the delay of getting back into the breach (and destroy a desk or two in his impatience). Ada's power evolution, while thrilling, borders on deus ex machina at times. Some interesting developments occur at the end of this book, so I am eager to read any sequel that may be written.
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