This is book 6 of the "Honor Harrington" series.

This note contains spoilers for the book.

Somehow seem to have missed re-reading this since I started the booklog, unless I did it as part of a mass quick re-read that didn't get logged in detail. So!

Honor gets offered a command back in the RMN, but it's far beneath her, and likely to get her killed. Two of her enemies collaborated to get it for her, but the real Navy people think she can come out on top, and she decides to give it a try.

This seems to be a rather up-beat story. She and various Peep commanders treat each other well, a psychopathic megalomaniac is stopped from blowing up large portions of an inhabited planet, Klaus Hauptman apologizes and means it, and nobody dies. No, wait, thousands of people die, including some quite close to her, but that's kind of the condition of contest in this series.

We get to examine the tactics of employing Q-ships for defense of commerce. Turns out they work better against independent pirates than they do against organized Peep raiding squadrons.

Also, Nimitz gets a girlfriend, gets her pregnant, and then her adopted human dies (in combat).