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Kris Longknife: Audacious | Rating | |
| B | |||
| Mike Shepherd | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| Kris Longknife | The First Casualty, The Price of Peace, They Also Serve, Kris Longknife: Mutineer, Kris Longknife: Deserter, Kris Longknife: Defiant, Kris Longknife: Resolute, Kris Longknife: Audacious | ||
When Lieutenant Kris Longknife is asked by her father, the King of Wardhaven, to visit New Eden and oversee some business negotiations, she agrees. But she should know by now that King Ray never does anything for only one reason, especially when it comes to Kris. Assassination attempts in this "perfect world" prove that something major is going on. And if the officials of New Eden are unwilling to take off the blinkers and see the revolution that is rewing, it'll be up to Kris to put a halt to it. That is, if she wants to.
Much to my surprise, I found qute a few typos throughout this novel. Most of them are misplaced posessives instead of plurals, like business's instead of businesses, and the ever-popular it's where its should be. Every time, it slammed me out of any immersion in the story. And it just looks awful.
But that — and other typos, along with some choices in writing style I personally didn't much like but which aren't actually wrong — is really the only flaw I found with the book. The story starts out running — literally — and it never really lets up. In those places where it lacks such furious energy, there is still plenty of tension in the air as Kris and her cohorts try to figure out just what is going on and how to stop it.
The book also does something else, something I've wanted to see in the series for quite some time: it tells some of Abby's past. The maid is skilled at everything but ship-to-ship combat, and can get her hands on some very peculiar merchandise no matter what planet she's on. Kris Longknife: Audacious doesn't really explain any of that — no more than the hints already dropped in previous volumes had, at any rate — but it does reveal something of her youth and upbringing. It may not make her any less of a supermaid, but it does humanize her a bit — something she's needed for at least two books.
In the end, this was a decent book that does a good job in continuing the series. It introduces a new adversary for Kris and brings Abby a little closer to believable, but otherwise adds little to the greater plot going on, the political battles between her family and the Peterwalds. And those editing errors were absolutely overwhelming.
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