2018 SF, third of its sub-series. David Rice and his subtly well-armed
merchant ship are still doing covert intelligence gathering for the
Protectorate.
The timeline has jumped forward a bit: we're now after Hand of
Mars and the Ardennes coup and civil war, and Red Falcon's crew is
being sent to trace the arms shipments that made that war possible.
But someone else is cleaning up their tracks… and there's some of the
frustration here that I found in Judgment of Mars as the good guys
repeatedly turn up just a bit too late to find a living lead.
Apart from that, this is the last book of its sub-series, so various
characters have to be got into position for future books, and/or given
happy endings to their arcs.
Which is a lot of scaffolding to fit into the book, and it does
sometimes get in the way of tne enjoyment. The character stuff is good
as always, but I think there are limits to how much fun one can have
with basically the same crew having basically the same fight in
basically the same space habitat before it starts to get old.
It's fun, it's entertaining, but it's not particularly germane to the
Big Plot of the overall series. To be fair, nobody claimed it was.
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