Halo: Ghosts, Cole, Harvest Book Reviews

In the last few years, Tor Books have released three Halo video game tie-in novels, and having just read the second trilogy in the ongoing series of standalone publications I thought I'd give a verdict on each.
GHOSTS OF ONYX (4/5)- Easily the best of the three, this one takes place inbetween the first and second games in the franchise, focusing on a SPARTAN-II who attempts to head an army of new SPARTANS as they're assigned to dangerous suicide missions. Soon enough, the SPARTAN-IIIs find their homeworld of Onyx coming to life when Master Chief destroys the first Halo ring, and the Covenant and United Nations Space Command race to find the secret of the Forerunner ruins lying underneath the planet's surface. It's a really interesting sci-fi adventure, tying together the threads of the game trilogy well, and even though it's hardly accessible to newcomers for the series, none of the books are so it would be unfair to criticise it for that. The only part of the storyline that lets it down is the predictable ending, not to mention that there's little sense of closure, but overall this is one of the strongest Halo tie-ins so far.
CONTACT HARVEST (2/5)- Sadly, I cannot say the same for this prequel, a lacklustre look at what Avery Johnson was doing before the events of the first game, and additionally how the human race first came into conflict with the Covenant. Contact Harvest is an example of an author taking a line of dialogue used to provide context to the game universe and turning it into an entire side story. Quite honestly, major lengths of the book seem to drag and it really feels as if Joseph Staten would have been better off crafting his own story similar to Ghosts of Onyx rather than be limited by the confines of an established tale (something Halo: Reach seemed to suffer from too).
THE COLE PROTOCOL (1/5)- Cole Protocol takes the needless adapting one step further, with the title proving rather irrelevant to the main plot of SPARTAN Grey Team's battle to tackle a poriton of the UNSC who have gone rogue with data that could lead the Covenant to Earth. Veterans of the series lore may enjoy the furthering of the Halo back-story here, but as a reader this is a wholly tedious and unenjoyable novel to try and plough through.