Storm from the Shadows

2009

This outing to the Honorverse sees us following the story of Honor's best friend and fifth-in-line to Manticore's throne. After being paroled back to Manticore after being taken prisoner by the Republic of Haven, Michelle Henke finds herself promoted and on the way to the newly renamed Talbott Quadrant to help integrate the planets in that far-off region into the Empire of Manticore.

She's...not precisely expecting to be bored - after all, the local command area was still awaiting the Sollies' response to the annexation and Captain Terekhov's attack on Monica and they weren't expecting OFS to take it lying down, but she was sure that her major problem would be in showing the flag with inadequate forces (the Admiralty was commissioning ships with work crews still on board, never mind theworking up trials but after the vicious losses of the Battle of Manticore the Admiralty required every hull it could pry loose of its building slips), anti piracy patrols, that sort of thing.

What Henke or her superiors hadn't counted on, however, were the murky manipulations in the background that had put a severely xenophobic Battle Fleet admiral in charge of the local Frontier Fleet sent to investigate the situation in the Cluster.

Will even Michelle Henke and her fellow commanders be able to stop an incident that would get the Manticoran Alliance into a war with the largest navy in the known galaxy and what of the players hidden in the shadows?!

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The first third or so of this book will be familiar to readers of At All Costs and The Shadow of Saganami as it covers events from both of these books, though these events are seen in either greater detail, or from a different point-of-view character thereby enable David Weber to say that this book contains a substantial amount of new writing (though it's the third time we see Hexapuma's return to Manticore...). After that, the action in the book rattles along at a fair pace even though many of the events are setting up for the next couple of books in the series - altready delivered to the publisher and assigned provisional release dates within the year.

One part of the action that is rather neglected is the interaction of the Manticoran Alliance with the Republic of Haven, though both sides have been knocked back by the climactic events of At All Costs.

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