This is book 11 of the "Honor Harrington" series.

This note contains spoilers for the book.

Latest Honor Harrington book. Since the last one was so bad, I had a policy of not paying for this one in place, and conveniently Baen released it with a CD containing all the text (and the rest of the series) with a license to share non-commercially, so I was able to obtain a copy from Scott Raun.

And this one was actually considerably better. I do however wish he hadn't written that program to calculate the losses from each stage of missile defense, and run it and included the output for ever single stage of every single battle. (Said program is a hypothesis on my part, I should make clear.)

On the other hand, he does interesting things with Honor's relationship with Hamish (finally gets them married, using the Grayson precedent of polygamy). The tech continues to evolve, the ships get bigger, the stakes get higher, the casualty list longer (well over 2 million deaths including both sides in the final battle, every single one of them military personnel). I do think some of the RMN people should have seen this as a logical response by the peeps to their deep raid, at least after the fact.

The end is a military stalemate, for a little while. The peeps probably don't have enough left to invade Manticore again, but the RMN needs everything it has to defend Manticore so they can't send out much of an expeditionary force. Which means it's time for that cancelled peace conference to come back to life.

I don't really believe in the magic mist that programs a person to engage in complex series of actions under perfect control, either. I guess it's probably something Manpower uses; the slavers are becoming the major bad guys really (borrowed from Crown of Slaves).

So I guess I'll be reading further books at least for a while.