2021 SF, first of a planned five-book series. An exploration ship
vanishes. The captain's father, a naval hero from the last war,
doesn't trust the authorities to do a good enough job looking, so
arranges to "borrow" a starship and go hunting himself.
This got a glowing review from an acquaintance on Mastodon and so
I stuck with it. But, alas, I found it a bit rubbish.
It's an appealing idea: the enemy seems to be using outdated ships, so
perhaps they're a revivalist faction of the Space Confederacy that
lost the war. But it's all a bit more complicated than that. There's a
puzzle to be solved here, and oh let's cut away to a bunch of space
marines on a planet that's been invaded for no obvious reason.
So half the book is basically generic mil-sf action, while the other
half has Our Hero taking command of a prototype ship on which every
experimental system works perfectly once the amateur engineers have
taken a bash at it. This ship, which was regarded as so unpromising
that it was about to be scrapped, casually out-fights much larger
ships with only a skeleton crew aboard.
Meanwhile on the planet the enemy have powered armour, named as such.
It has enhanced strength and reflexes. But nobody seems to have
thought of maybe not leaving the wearer's throat exposed.
This book had a really promising start, particularly the recruiting of
spacers who've lost their permits for a variety of infractions, and
the eventual revelation of what's going on does at least the benefit
of novelty, but my goodness the time spent getting there is
technoglurge. This isn't really dire like The Fold, but neither
does the writing ever sing, the characters have one dimension at most,
and overall there's just no reason to read this unless you want the
written equivalent of random Star Trek episodes playing on an
unregarded screen in the corner of the room.