Rating: WARTY!
My commitment this year was to read and review all of the eleven Kris Longknife books I had on my shelf, and that has been met. I also had one Vicky Peterwald book, which spun off from the Longknife series after "Daring". I have read half of this and gave up on it. It was was awful! Yes, it was blessedly free of the tedious Longknife crew and their inane smart-mouthing, and it was free of the stuck-in-a-rut plotting of that series, but it was boring as hell! Nothing was happening except a deadeningly tedious and repetitious cascade of assassination attempts on her life - even more than Kris Longknife typically gets.
The most pathetic aspect to all this is that Peterwald knows who is behind this and all she has to do is kill the vicious stepmother who is doing this, yet she does literally nothing. In short, this is not the Vicky Peterwald I started liking from the Longknife books. This is a paradoxically shy and retiring nymphomaniac, but the sex scenes were evidently managed by a prude, and ruthlessly cut short or not featured at all, so even they go nowhere. On top of that, Peterwald makes me dislike her from the start by throwing Kris Longknife under the bus after the battle with the aliens in Daring. This is after the two of them had begun bonding in previous books. It made no sense. Yes, she has to protect herself and explain the loss of her mini-navy in that battle, but the reasons for it were obvious and for her to simply betray someone with whom she was becoming friends made zero sense and made her look like a complete jerk. I no longer like her.
I have to ask then, what is the point of this novel? It offered no adventure as the Lognknife books did. It offered none of the sex it might have been deemed to have promised given Vicky's rather, shall we say, relaxed approach to morality (and as the Longknife books didn't), and it had nothing of any real interest going on. I'm sorry, but what's the point in reading this series? At least, on occasion, the Longknife books had some things of interest here and there even if they were predictable and she had the dullest clique surrounding her that it was possible to conceive. These Peterwald books offer nothing at all if they're all like the first one. I am done with this author. It's long past time for something new and stimulating in the sci-fi department.
