Crown of Slaves

2003

Although set in the same timeline as Weber’s Honor Harrington books, this book does not feature Honor or any of her colleagues, except briefly as a walk on part and was jointly written with Eric Flint. Instead we follow the adventures of Anton Zilwicki and his adopted daughter Berry, and Ruth Winton, adopted niece to the Manticoran Queen. Ruth had decided that she would best serve the people of Manticore as an intelligence officer, and Anton was the best in that shadowy trade.

Anton and Berry had been called to the palace to meet Ruth and to be informed of the brewing trouble on Erewhon which was questioning it’s place in the Manticoran Alliance. In order to see how bad the situation really was, the Queen and Ruth had come up with a plan that would get Ruth in to a position where she could analyse the situation whilst being the Queen’s representative at the funeral of a murdered politician. At 17 Berry was all for it. The more experienced Anton was sweating rods, for the Royal Plan meant that his daughter would take on the appearance of the princess. But Anton has his own reasons to go to Erewhon and so he reluctantly accepts responsibility for the youngsters.

Meanwhile the Haven government had sent its own special representative to the funeral – Victor Cachat, only beaten by Anton Zilwicki himself in the Biz, and the ex slave Virginia Usher, the extremely sexy wife of his boss!

Almost as soon as their official duties had been concluded, Anton learnt more about the background of one of the Conservative Alliance’s more mercenary supporters. Unable to ignore this, he leaves the girls alone (well, apart from the squad of the Queen’s Own as bodyguards). But Erewhon’s a civilised place. And it’s still not an enemy, though that was through no fault of the current Manticoran diplomatic team!

Unknown to Anton Zilwicki and Victor Cachat was a squad of Masadan terrorists whose bloody mission soon became apparent on the pleasure Orbital ‘The Wages of Sin’. A squad led by a man who saw the princess as nothing more than a runaway sister, and in Masadan religion women were nothing more than chattels!

Will the princess survive her first major introduction to the galactic scene??

Despite the joint names on the book cover, I feel that the vast majority of the book is Eric Flint’s in both plot and execution. Although Anton and his natural daughter were bit characters in A Short Victorious War, they got their first major outing in the short story collections under Flint's name. This book also has much of Flint’s trademark small-scale action and political manoeuvring. Only near the end do we get a space battle and by what we have come to expect from the Honorverse it is a very small scale thing indeed.

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