World War III began with Chinese warbots walking out of the ocean near Washington D.C. They were initially held off by the Outlaw Motorcycle Club, who happened to be holding their annual rally outside the city, but the situation just kept escalating both on Earth and in space. For ten years humanity did its worst to destroy both the Earth and themselves until the alien bugs came along and forced peace with their superior technology. The survivors now live in a drastically altered climate with discarded bio-weapons and deadly technology hidden beneath the surface. Thanks to their early heroics, the Outlaws now have a strong relationship with the US government. One of their most well known heroes was a twelve year old girl named Shining Smith who single-handedly brought down one of the Mother Warbots and earned her status as the first female made-man of the Outlaws. Sadly Shining, known as Little Girl to the club, died not long after. Or did she? The club received a distress signal from her old kutte (battle vest) which leads the Enforcer Jagger to a junkyard in the desert formerly known as West Virginia. There he finds a strange woman and her even stranger cats under attack.
There's a lot of premise behind these novellas. Did author Faith Hunter wonder what would happen if Mad Max, Ender's Game, Terminator, Sons of Anarchy, and Firefly had a child and then decided to throw in a few cats for good measure? Not that the cats are an afterthought, they not only take part in the fighting but serve to underscore the ways in which Shining herself is no longer human. Still, Junkyard Cats takes all the background explanations and actions of a full novel and distills it into one long action sequence as Shining attempts to defend her junkyard (and it's many secrets) from bio-engineered ants, killer robots, and a rival motorcycle club. Not an average day, even for a meta-human.
This is possibly the most ambitious series of novellas I've run across. The first book is a bit dense with so much background including a lot of sci-fi biology and physics. Given the amount of information Junkyard Cats takes longer to read than some full length novels but Junkyard Bargain goes a lot faster. There is enough discussion of real and speculative guns to delight any member of the NRA. I'd say the cats are more a matter of speculation but no one really knows how the feline mind works as it is. There is a certain entertainment value in America's road warriors facing off against invading warbots and any Warhammer player knows how much firepower it takes to penetrate that heavy armor plating. The title caught my attention as a cat lover, but its definitely the inner Warhammer player in me that most enjoyed these books.
There are certainly conflicting reviews on these books. Much of the criticism is rooted in the fact that these are novellas and as readers we are used to the novel length format with most of the world building explained early followed by the action and character development. That doesn't happen here but not just because Faith Hunter condensed them into novellas. The first story is introduced in much the same way as the movie Avatar which got many of the same complaints because viewers were confused by the lack of background. I'm honestly surprised by the confusion here since most of the concepts are so similar to other well known franchises (which I feel is the more valid complaint) but there is nothing here that would be familiar to the fans of Hunter's two better known series which are both urban fantasy. One negative review on Audible suggests that this was not a published story but only an audiobook. Both are currently available in e-book and audiobook.
Narrator Khristine Hvam has a long list of titles to her name including Hunter's Jane Yellowrock books and one of my personal favorites Michelle Sagara's Cast series. Many people rated her performance higher than the story for Junkyard Cats.