The Privilege of Peace

Yet another fun Torin Kerr adventure! Huff hits that mix that makes for a great military space opera: likable, relatable characters; intergalactic politicking; thrilling adventure; and a dark sense of humour that helps prevent the story from getting bogged down in the face of the violence that fills the characters' lives. I could easily read another twenty books like this, I like it that much.

The one downside to this book is that it's rumoured to be the last Torin novel - and it doesn't feel like that at all. The Big Yellow storyline gets resolved, obviously, but there's no sense of the ending of a story arc for Torin and the rest of Strike Team Alpha, which is a little disappointing.

A fitting finale to the series, and a chance to reconnect with a couple of my favorite characters (Alamber!), even though some of the usual suspects only play a minor part this time (like Presit).
I'm going to miss Torin and her crew - good thing I can go and re-read both the Valor and the Peacekeeper series whenever I feel the need for a bit of (ex-)space marine snark.

There is a lot of stuff going on in this book - like three-four different story lines. While that is helpful, because there was some early stuff that just seemed to drag on, I also feel that it was a little too much. I mean, I did still enjoy it, but things just felt kind of abrupt and rather shallow because there was just so much stuff happening. As a series finale...I am a little disappointed. I prefer a little more breathing time at the end of my series and this was like: final fight, big reveal, done. There's no real character moments.

Like I said, I did enjoy it, but I am also very, very glad I'm done with the series.

I will add, I liked it more than the previous book because, though there were more names in the appendix, there was only about seven new characters that you really needed to keep track of - which helped tremendously.