Rating: WORTHY!
This is volume four of a five-book series known as the Vatta Wars or Vatta's War, and which consists of Trading In Danger, Marque And Reprisal, Engaging The Enemy, Command Decision, and Victory Conditions. The main character is Kylara Vatta, who in volume one parlayed a shit-assignment of delivering an old spacecraft to a breaker's yard into having her own ship. Kylara is a disgraced military recruit, who uses her military training to keep on step ahead of rivals and out of trouble - with varying degrees of success.
Kylara Vatta started out as military, fell into disgrace, went limping back to her family's interstellar commerce, was successful, but was gradually forced back into military mode by piracy. This volume was a bit of a pause and a breath before the finale, since not a whole heck of a lot new happens. The villains who have taken down the purported galaxy-wide communications system have acted with speed and decision, and seem to be winning the battle. Everyone else has been wrong-footed and there seems to be little orchestrated effort to take on the pirates or to fix the damage they've done. This is the gap that Kylara is aiming to fill.
This to me is the biggest weakness with these space operas. You can't write about space in the same way you can, for example write about piracy on the high seas, yet far too many blinkered and short-sighted sci-fi writers (David Weber I'm looking at you) think you can translate 2-D Earth issues and events into outer space with very little thought or change. They simply do not get the massive size of space, and the fact that it's 3D. It results in stories which sound stupid and fake.
I for one have never been convinced that there would be a huge traffic in interstellar commerce and nothing I've read in a host of sci-fi stories has convinced me otherwise - not yet. They simply don't get the massive costs involved in interstellar travel even if warp vessels were invented, nor do they seem to appreciate the vast distances involved and the pointlessness of buying items from one planet that could far more easily and cheaply be manufactured on the planet where they're needed.
Yes, maybe a planet has something special that is found nowhere else, but would people truly want to pay the billions involved in having someone go there and bring that particular thing home? Often the thing is some sort of mineral or alloy, but the same elements found on Earth or in asteroids around the solar system exist throughout the universe. There's nothing out there that can't be found or manufactured here. There are no magical undiscovered elements, and any alloys or minerals can be recreated far more cheaply on Earth than the cost of flying interstellar distances to retrieved them. In short, it makes no sense.
That said, Moon tells a decent story and if you're willing to overlook some of the more incredible parts of the novel, an entertaining tale is to be had here.
