2010 SF, sixth and last in its series. Ishmael Horatio Wang moves from
merchant ship captain to owner, though he's not entirely clear why.
That's a recurring problem in the book, really: having got into
merchant service as the least bad option when he was about to be
thrown off his home world back in book one, Wong has been following the
track (do your exams, get your ratings, do the academy, get your
officer's ticket, become a captain, and now go independent) without
ever really questioning whether it's what he wants from life. With the
payoff from a salvage job in the previous book now coming his way, he
could retire to a life of relative luxury. He's offered an
alternative, and has a vague feelings that when there's this much
money sloshing around people probably aren't doing it out of the
goodness of their hearts, but he doesn't have any better plan of his
own.
But in the end he gets to babysit the heir to the company while she
works as a spacer for a year, before she's allowed to take over
control. It rapidly becomes clear that someone doesn't want her to
take control, and is escalating from legal to rather more dubious
means. Meanwhile we meet another arm of the shipping ecosystem (the
"fast packet", mixed cargo and freight, and apparently nobody has
thought before of using them for luxury express travel). There are
more crew to be got to the point of doing their jobs, romance,
tragedy…
And it's strange, it often seems that while Wong is working hard to do
one thing, other stuff that most people have to fight for just gets
handed to him. If he were a bit more aware of how kind the universe
is being to him, he could have a much better time. (And when the
villain was revealed to be the one person who absolutely did not need
to resort to this sort of shenanigans, I didn't throw the book away
because I was nearly at the end anyway, but goodness I was not
convinced.)
A series that started off as an enjoyable if slight Bildungsroman
ends up flailing and adrift. Maybe this is meant to be an indictment
of the whole romance of the seas idea. I don't have enough confidence
in Lowell as a writer to believe he could do that deliberately, in the
same book where he slips costs by a factor of a thousand (or maybe
more, I can't be sure).