2016 SF, last of its trilogy. Jak needs to get back to her homeworld
of Haefen for specialised medical attention, and to hunt down the
sniper who killed her brother; Torrin needs to go there because her
sister and business partner has been kidnapped.
And while we're expected to believe that they are each other's
One True Loves, I suspect MacTague thinks that stable couples are
boring, because my goodness they each do a lousy job of guessing what
the other wants, and it's apparently against their religions actually
to ask before acting. Each of them's trying to protect the other by
taking all the risk on herself, which is an interesting dynamic, but
they go on doing it even after they've agreed that it was the wrong
thing to do.
Sometimes this works – as when Jak wants to do just one more useful
thing that only she can do before getting the treatment, because then
each of them has a valid argument and there'd be room for discussion
if they'd talk about it. But even a good idea can be overdone if
repeated to excess, and for me it was.
There are also lots of new people and ideas; we finally see something
of the Solarian League that's been the background nuisance all
through, and… it doesn't seem so terrible after all, if not very
effective. Apparently their hand weapons (which Torrin has been
smuggling to the planet) have transponders in them, and they never
thought of using this to find out where they were ending up on the
planet until Torrin suggested it. But by the end they're planning to
end Torrin's smuggling career, as far as I can tell because their
captain got in a snit about something even though until then she's
been presented as one of the good competent people, and there isn't
even time to work out what might happen next in Torrin's life. (A
later short story, Landing
Day, develops
this further, but would have been welcome as an epilogue.)
There are dramatic moments that work well, and even some personal
moments ditto, but the pacing is off – too many new ideas for a last
volume – and to me at least this book seemed to take the elements I
liked least from volume two and make them the centrepiece. It's not
terrible, but it felt to me like a let-down compared with the earlier
books, particularly the first.
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