Providence

I found this one browsing in a Swedish SF bookstore. Usually Swedish book prices are a bit too steep for me, but this was marked down to about ten bucks so I snapped it up. This story began with a seriously good hook, essentially an encounter with an alien race goes spectacularly badly. We quickly move on to a crew of four aboard a massive warship of the new Providence class. It's a ship that is controlled by AI and the crew feel largely irrelevant. You get to know these four pretty well and the story zips along so fast. I gobbled this one up. The Daily Mail likened it to “Starship Troopers with added brain” and that's pretty spot on. This is my second book I've read by this author and won't be my last.