This note contains spoilers for the book.

 

By David Weber and John Ringo. I remember it as the other way around, but Amazon seems pretty clear about it. At least it saves me from the ignominy of having "ringoj-*" files in my booknotes directory (for a while longer). I read this off one of the Baen books free ebook CDs.

The wastrel prince was sent away from trouble, and ends up in worse; the plotters have sabotaged the ship he's on. Despite not liking or respecting him, the Queen's Own marines guarding him work to do so, and he learns a LOT fighting their way across a huge planet from where they crashed to what passes for civilization. Where they discover that they're all dead, and all considered traitors, accused of trying to stage a coup.

But all that's the back-story; the story in this book is planning to go back and rescue the Empress (his mother), his place as heir, and to save the Empire from breaking up. And to take revenge on the bad guys, who they learn are being very mean to the Empress.

There's quite a lot of good stuff to the book, and I got considerable amusement from covering their base on Earth as a restaurant. I liked Prince Roger (reformed) well enough, and could understand his tendency towards being bloodthirsty under the circumstances -- especially since the rest of his staff work to find ways to keep it down.

But after the setup and preparation, the actual climactic battle lasts far too long, and doesn't really hold my interest. There's too much detail and not enough simultaneously; I think the writing is a bit perfunctory, maybe, doing the easy details and not the hard ones.

They do deal with the problem of the partially-crazy Empress pretty decently, and she comes through and does the right thing in the end (making it easy for the other good guys).

We don't get to see the trials and executions or anything, but we do see the lack of summary executions immediately after the victory.

The ship technology is very Weber-like but clearly different, which occasionally causes a bit of confusion. But at least Weber has decommissioned the missile-defense-percentages script.