BooksOfTheMoon

First, and to get it out of the way, the cover (the one with Torin leaning over what appears to be a dying Alamber, and another di’Taykan slumped in the background) isn’t a reflection of any scene in the book. I don’t know where illustrator Paul Youll pulled that from, but we don’t have to suffer Torin having to watch Alamber die.

So what do they actually get up to, if not being shot? The first half of the book is spent mostly on setup, showcasing the widening of the Strike Team programme within the Justice Department and how the teams are integrating and working together, as well as the wider politics of the Confederation – now that the war is over, many people are clamouring for the Younger Races to be grounded (literally – at the bottom of gravity wells on planets) until they lose some of their violent tendencies. Alongside that, we get the continuing adventures of Humans First, as they pirate and pillage through a xenophobic strop that just points out the validity of locking them in their rooms until they grow up.

It’s only about half way through that the two big set pieces of the book kick in – an incident with the Silsviss, who Torin helped bring into the Confederation; and the return of Big Yellow. This is handled deftly, as they split the party and head to both situations at once. Huff is very good at interweaving the two stories, not spending too long with any one, and constantly shifting points of view to keep the action moving.

While I think that the final resolution to both the plot in this book and that of the wider series has a whiff of deus ex machina about it, and I’ve never been fond of the plastic aliens, I still enjoyed this a lot. It’s a satisfying conclusion to a series carefully built up over the previous seven books. We get to see different sides of Torin over that span and get to know the team around her in the last three. I’ve always had a soft spot for Alamber (hence my leading with him not dying) and I’m glad to see him getting a chance to develop and take a big step here as well.

It’s been a pleasure following Staff/Gunnery Sergeant/Warden Kerr over the course of her adventures and I’m pleased with how her story, her whole team’s story, has ended.

Having given up freelancing and become Wardens of the Confederation (the space police, basically), Torin and her team are sent to a planet where a group of archaeologists are being held hostage by a group of extremists looking for an ancient weapon that they could use against the sentient plastic that started and maintained the war between the Confederation and the Primacy for centuries. And since the kidnappers are composed of both Confederation and Primacy species, Torin has to take a group of Primacy in her team as well.

I found this book quite annoying. The main plot driver just didn’t make sense to me – you find some plastic in a latrine of a pre-industrial civilisation and my first thought is not that they obviously found a weapon to use against the sentient plastic. This is a galaxy with many, many spacefaring civilisations, some of them very old indeed. How do you know one of them didn’t just stop off for a picnic or something? And then you’ve got Torin’s huge leap of logic right at the end of the book about what happened to the dead race under investigation. And the annoying thing is that I bet she’s right, but only because she’s being a spokesperson for the author, not because it makes any sense at all.

The usual supporting cast are all present and correct, but the new Primacy group added to the team don’t really get a lot of characterisation and I struggled to remember who each of them were and what their important relationships were, and also what they looked like a lot of the time (although this last point is true of the main cast too).

In this one, the human extremist group Humans First (they’ve dropped the apostrophe by now) are still driving events, which is wearying, but the point bears repeating – concepts of “us” and “them” are entirely malleable and prone to changing. In a post-Trump, post-Brexit world, this shouldn’t need reinforcing, but it constantly does.

So not the best of the series, but I’ve already got the next, and last, book lined up. The cover illustration of my edition better not be a spoiler…

Out of the military, Torin Kerr now leads a small band of ex-marines and others in a freelance capacity, doing the work that the Justice department can’t be seen to be doing. And now Military Intelligence wants them to find the long-lost homeworld of the H’San, now a peaceful race and one of the founders of the Confederation, but then a warlike race, who left large caches of weapons behind, and stop grave robbers from starting a new war.

This is a fun book that keeps up a good pace. I love a bit of competency porn, and no-longer-Gunnery-Sergeant Kerr is a great example as she charges through every obstacle with a combination of careful, intelligent thought and brute force. I’d hoped that now that she’s out of the military, we’d get some characterisation for the group around her, as usually characterisation was a surefire indication that they were going to die. But other than Alamber, who they rescued at the end of the last book, there’s not much of that around. Still, this is military SF and there’s a satisfying amount of explosions and punches to make up for it.

As the war ramps down in the series, the politics of the situation is starting to take its place, to some degree. There was a little of that here, with the Human’s [sic] First nationalist organisation appearing (and yes, that misplaced apostrophe gets snarked on a lot) and a coda at the end connecting some dots that hadn’t been before. There’s tension between the elder races who have “evolved beyond violence” and the younger races that they recruited to do their fighting for them. I’m looking forward to seeing how the situation plays out over the course of the rest of the series.

Former Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr has now left the Marine Corp and is making a life in civvie street with her partner, Craig Ryder. Although the war with the Others Primacy is more or less over, space is still a dangerous place, as she discovers as their ship is attacked and Craig is taken by pirates, and she is left for dead. Unfortunately, the pirates made a big mistake in not making sure of it, as Torin gathers together some of her former colleagues and goes after them.

I think this is the first book not to be told exclusively from the point of view of either Torin or Craig, as we get into the head of Mackenzie Cho, the pirate captain who took Craig. And that’s not a pleasant place to be. Interestingly, Cho’s deep sense of entitlement and anger at supposed denial of his rights are reminiscent of the kind of man who frequents the worst areas of 4chan and the ‘manosphere’, coupled with ruthlessness and cruelty that make him an incredibly unpleasant person, and you look forward to him getting his due at Torin’s hands.

Torin is outwith her comfort zone here, with no chain of command, and without the resources of the Marine Corp at her back, and we see the strain that this puts on her, and her colleagues see it as well. Perhaps not burdened with a direct involvement and also still delegating to her, they see the situation more clearly than she does at times. No longer soldiers, but not fitting into a civilian life, they jump at the chance to be doing something as a unit again.

The ending is somewhat intriguing, as the Confederation acknowledges that their current structures aren’t suitable for post-war civilisation and Torin is asked to pull together such a fast-response team. That leads into a new trilogy which I look forward to investigating in due course (and I’m sure those plastic aliens will be back as well…).

Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr is involved in a major battle and is thought killed in action. However, unknown to everyone, she ends up in a prisoner-of-war camp. Which is interesting, since, as far as everyone knows, the enemy don’t take prisoners. First she has to sort out problems in what is nominally her own side before she can pull a team together and get on with the serious business of escaping. What she finds may change the course of the war.

This is a fun, fast-paced novel that doesn’t let go once it’s started. As usual, there’s a mostly new set of faces around as Torin is dropped into a new situation without (most of) her crew but a few familiar faces are present. And the old spot-the-ones-about-to-die game is present and correct (although I guessed completely wrongly).

I’ve come to like Torin an awful lot over the course of these books, even if I haven’t fallen quite so far into her cult of personality as Darlys. She very obviously cares about the people under her care and does her damnedest to get them out alive, even in circumstances well beyond her control.

I’m looking forward to reading the last in the series now.