Mike Waller books in order

Sometimes, death is necessary.

Two thousand years after the Great Diaspora humanity has spread across the Orion Spur, the human domain fractured and diverse, divided into numerous small federations, empires, dictatorships and a thousand unaligned and lonely planets.

On one of those small worlds a plant grows, a weed that feeds the addiction of many and the greed and avarice of a few, and kills without favor.

Lazarus Hawk, ex-soldier and ex-mercenary, convicted of a crime of terror he did not commit, and sentenced to life on an airless prison moon from which there is no escape, has been offered a way out. It’s a chance. A good chance.

To accept the offer, all he has to do is die.

Forced to undertake a mission against his better judgment, Hawk finds himself teaming up with the locals of a small, backward world, and Abbie Renner, a young Guarda officer searching for the source of the drug Hellfire, and prepared to go to any lengths. This time she has gone too far. This time she needs help.

Can Hawk overcome the mistrust and reticence of a small colony world to accomplish the mission he has been forced to undertake in return for his life?

The Echo’s Way stories tell the adventures of Echo Bourke, a remarkable young woman who finds herself embroiled against her will in the harsh reality of a war between the Federation of Humanity and a powerful alien neighbor, the Tolleani.

Each Book is a separate adventure, rather than part of a continuing, single story. There is no ‘to be continued’ and no cliff-hanger endings. Each book can be read as a stand-alone story in the life of our heroine.

This volume contains the first three ECHO’S WAY adventures. The first two short novels were written prior to the stories becoming a series, and are an introduction to the character, Echo Bourke, giving us the story of where she came from and what events led to her involvement with the war between Humankind and the Tolleani. Book 3 is the first full length ECHO novel, and tells the tale of her first mission as part of the Federation Space Forces.

Seventeen years old is much too young to take on an entire alien empire.

Echo Bourke, sole survivor of a remote human colony following an attack by the Tolleani, a dangerous alien species with whom humanity is at war.

Her problem? Barbus Koll, an incompetent but dangerous alien with an ego the size of a planet.

For three years Echo survives alone, waiting for rescue. When the aliens return to set up a research base at the community which had once been her home, she hides alone in the nearby mountains until the first human ship arrives, to be promptly captured by the aliens.

When Ben, a member of the captured crew, escapes, he stumbles upon Echo's hideaway. She needs his help to escape, but soon learns that he has an agenda of his own, and needs her help to achieve it.

What happens when a small colony on a remote planet suddenly finds itself cut off from the rest of the human occupied galaxy? Would they survive, or would anarchy take over? And what happens when suddenly they find themselves a part of humanity once again?

Having escaped from the ruins of her home world, Echo finds herself without a future path when her partner Ben is lost in action and presumed dead. Determined to join the war effort, Echo sets out for the military academy, only to have her ship waylaid.

When she escapes from the ship's attackers, she finds herself on a lost world, fighting with a small group of rebels against a regime which holds the population in virtual slavery.

In a society cowed by subjugation and without weapons, she searches for a way to lead a small band of rebels to free the population and return the lost colony to the Federation, and to freedom. And always, she continues her quest to find what happened to Ben.

Persephone, a dark, alien moon drenched by incessant rain, the air poisonous and every land surface overflowing with life so hostile and aggressive that just being there is to put your life at risk. And hidden among that living morass, the greatest of all secrets.

The war between Humanity and the Tolleani, a vast and powerful galactic empire, rolls ever onward, and Echo, now a member of Fleet, finds herself in a Special Services rescue squad, assigned a mission of inestimable importance to the Federation. Faced with a virus that threatens to decimate humanity, Echo’s squad must rescue a team of scientists who may possess the solution to the crisis.

From the beginning the mission does not go as planned, becoming worse when Echo realizes the greatest threat to her continued survival comes not from the enemy, but from within her own squad. Captured by the Tolleani, she learns that her greatest enemy is also present on this tiny, deadly world.

When she discovers the true purpose of the mission, she fights to deal with her overpowering obsession to revenge her lost family. Finding herself alone, she joins the most unlikely of allies in her efforts to salvage what remains of the mission.

An alien starship appears in the Solar System! Humanity faces a glorious future, or total extinction, and only Joe Falcon can make the choice..

When an unidentified vessel appears beyond Jupiter, both Earth and Mars begin a frantic race to claim it, aware that whichever planet succeeds might in so doing achieve advantage over the other. But who should they send?

When the surveyor Butterball rendezvous with the Visitor, Joe discovers a ship so immense, exploring its thousands of square kilometers of decks is impossible. As the alien vessel responds to his presence in wondrous yet frightening ways, not a trace of its inhabitants can be found. 

Virtually everything Joe and his team sees defies explanation, and little is what it appears to be. Joe soon realizes he and his crew are expendable and cannot take anything or anyone at face value, including his own employers. And all the time, the crew is being watched and studied. Then humanity learns that this wondrous spacecraft is not their real problem.

Never would Joe have imagined it would fall to him to make the decision that would alter the destiny of two worlds, launching humanity towards a glorious future, or to extinction.

One man holds the future of humanity in his hands.

Six decades after the Blackship War, Earth is once again under alien attack, the weapon of choice one that humanity could never anticipate, and never hope to counter. Humankind is being attacked by its own planet.

Six decades after the departure of the gigantic, alien star-ship dubbed the ‘Minaret’, Joe Falcon thinks it is finally over, and he can settle down to a better, quieter life.

He is wrong.

At the outermost edge of the Solar System lurks an alien intelligence the like of which humanity has never before encountered, with an agenda of its own.

As the leading authority of the Minaret, it falls to Joe to find a solution and travel billions of kilometers to confront Mankind’s greatest ever threat. But how do you deal with a mind so alien, so advanced, and so filled with hatred, that nothing will sway it from its destructive course.

Joe must find a way. If humanity is to survive, he has no choice.