Mike Shepard
Before she can go herself to seek out the new BEM (Bug Eyed Monsters), Kris is sent back to the rim to continue her pirate hunt. She is now commander of a small fleet. What she finds is more human trafficking and piracy that leads to planet sized famine. She fixes it... even though it is really a Peterwald problem.
3 stars (out of 4)
Mike Shepard
Meeting actual Itchee, the bitter sworn alien enemy of the Itchee war of the last generation is novel. It is the first meeting since the war armistice. And Kris Longknife is the initial contact. The message brought by the Itchee suggests that a bigger, badder alien is starting to encroach on Itchee territory (which means that humanity is in reach). Kris delivers the Itchee back to Wardhaven personally to make sure the message gets to the right people.
3 stars (out of 4)
Mike Shepard
Kris has been formally assigned as a pirate hunter on the outer rim. Keeping trading routes open is key to the new United Sentients group of planets who are politically opposed by Greenfield (owned and operated by the Peterwald's). In the process of this pirate hunting, Kris solves a few problems and finds that she is being setup as the obvious assassin of the Peterwald family head. When she heads this off, they will owe her big time... won't they?
3 stars (out of 4)
Tanya Huff
Book 4 in the Valor sequence
Torin Kerr is now even more famous, and is happy to just join her old company as a regular old Gunny on a regular old Marine Corps engagement. But right at the beginning of the battle, she suddenly finds herself waking up in an underground tunnel, and then finds that it is some sort of prison camp where she encounters a few hundred other Marines. Of course, Kerr leads a small team on a jail break and when everything is its most strange, it gets stranger - cue the organic plastic alien.
4 stars (out of 4)
Mike Shepard
Now a semi-fixture on the rim, it seems that one of the planets in her orbit is the site of a power struggle. When Kris and her crew intervene, not everything is as it seems. While helping out the locals, she continues to encounter galactic political opposition to her being alive, in the form of assassination attempts. Don't worry, she survives...
3 stars (out of 4)
Kris Longknife is sent to Chance, a backwater planet needing a space station coordinator. While there, she captures pirates and survives more assassination attempts. We are also more and more impressed with Nelly, Kris AI personal computer who seems to be growing her own legend. Having integrated some alien technology (the same aliens who built the jump points), Nelly is seeing things no-one else is seeing.
3 stars (out of 4)
Mike Shepherd
Kris Longknife is back home on Wardhaven, and the Navy is looking for a job for her where she can stay out of the limelight and just do her job. While waiting for orders, we find the entirety of the fleet traveling to a nearby star to scare off some pirates. Seems like the Society of Humanity (a 600 something confederation of planets) is starting to politically disintegrate, with isolationists holding sway. While all this is happening, four massive supercruisers enter the Wardhaven system, demanding immediate surrender. Longknife becomes the commander in chief of the local volunteer defense force to take on the impossible odds. The legend continues to grow...
In the space battles, this is a pretty good sci-fi treatment of how space battles might happen, with time and speed and space completely different than a land based or even air based battle. But pretty good is not excellent. See The Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell for excellent.
3 stars (out of 4)
Mike Shepherd
Kris Longknife takes some leave to go searching for a friend who is missing. When she arrives on the planet Turantic, she finds that she has been drawn there to set up an assassination attempt. Apparently there is bad blood with the Peterwald family that just won't go away.
3 stars (out of 4)
Mike Shepherd
Kris Longknife is a freshly minted officer in the Navy. But her family is wealthy beyond compare (great grandpa an industrial titan), politically connected (dad is the PM of a planet), and militarily connected (two grandpa generals). The family is universally known as "those damn longknifes". Kris is put through the ringer in this first book in the series as she leads a naval drop team on a hostage rescue mission (where she is almost killed), gets assigned to a humanitarian mission on a flooded planet (where she is almost killed), and then is tasked as offensive weapons officer on her naval warship (where she is almost killed). See the pattern. I will be curious to see where this series goes. It is typically slotted in the space opera / military sci-fi genre, but it seems more like galactic political theater. Stay tuned...
3 stars (out of 4)
Tanya Huff
Book 5 in the Valor sequence
The war is "over" and ex-Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr is throwing in her lot with Salvage Operator Craig Ryder. It is definitely a learning curve joining civilian life, but when salvage operators are getting killed by pirates, Kerr knows exactly what to do. This is a good standalone book in the world Huff has created, pulling just enough on the familiar characters to allow us to jump into the action, but applying the characters to a new scenario. In the end, [spoiler alert] pirates defeated and a small opening left for more books in the series.
4 stars (out of 4)
