2024 SF/romance, sixth in (and a late addition to) the Class 5 series.
Dav, Sazo and a pregnant Rose are on the expedition to make contact
with the race that built Irini, the thinking-system ship recovered
from thieves in Dark Class. But then Rose is kidnapped…
It's mostly the recipe as before, but not quite. For a start,
there's no new romance; for another thing, the new thinking system met
here does not immediately fall into alliance with the heroine as we've
seen in previous books. Also one of the alien races here is not
monolithic, instead having multiple factions; Rose rapidly finds
herself thrown without context into a multipolar struggle, and has
only the immediate behaviour of each faction's representatives to use
in picking a side.
The meat of the book is still mostly procedural capture and escape and
Rose Is Pregnant, but there's also some psychology that is genuinely
alien by being very close to standard human patterns but not quite
the same.
Definitely not a place to start; Rose and Dav and Sazo were introduced
in book 1, Irini (who's not on stage here but is significant to the
background) in book 5, and while there's some re-introduction and the
experienced SF reader will readily work out broadly what's going on,
having read the other books will make more sense of it.
This still isn't one of the all-time SF greats, but while to some
extent it's retreading earlier ideas in a more worn-down manner I
think the changes it introduces may make it my favourite book in the
series so far.