"Yay fer books!" - What We're Reading.

My favorite of the series so far is First Strike.

Actually I got it mixed up with the 4th in the series that I forgot I had... Ghosts of Onyx.
Ghosts of Onyx starts off with the Spartans on a mission, in space. One of the Spartans' harness fails and he is jetisoned through space on an unknown trajectory at an unknown speed...

Later in the book, you find that the incident was staged, and the UNSC hijacked that spartan to train a new series of Spartans, the Spartan IIIs. The original Spartans were never meant to go public. Their revealing to the public was a critical move to raise the moral of the UNSC forces, to show that the human race isn't giving up without a fight. As such, they are restricted from certain missions, missions that guarantee no survivors. The Spartan IIIs on the other hand, do not technically exist, so they are allowed to go on these high risk missions. In fact, that is the whole reason for their creation. And to keep their existance a secret, they are trained on a planet on the outskirts of the colonies, a planet named for its rich deposits of the magnificent mineral. Onyx. I am not going to ruin the main part of the book, but near the end, for me at least, gets the best response of mixed emotions, from sadness to joy to excitement.

Ghosts of Onyx. The fourth book in the series, and it has no direct ties to any of the games. Actually, Master Chief is hardly mentioned in the book.