Steel Frame is a triumph of style over substance, somewhat ironic given that the style is building sized 'frames, futuristic humanoid spacefaring war machines equipped with battleship scale guns. Our narrator, Rook, is a frame jockey and convict. She's pulled out of the chain gang and assigned to a squadron on the NorCol dreadnaught Horizon, orbiting a vast storm in space called the Eye. Somewhere inside the Eye is a hostile force that is both powerful and incredibly dangerous, and it's up to Rook and her squad of Hail, Lear, and Salt, to fight and survive.

There's a terse grandeur to the writing. These are profoundly broken people in a screwed up situation, and Skinner keeps the action moving. The close quarters battle is truly kinetic, and the steel immensity of the Horizon is a evocative setting. But the plot, involving a horrific computer virus that takes over machines and turns them against fail humans, is a mystery that never really pays off. The desperate corporate war on the edge of human space feels pro-forma. There's a really good retro-cyberpunk milSF story here, something like Walter John Williams Hardwired and Voice of the Whirlwind, about the pain of surviving, but Steel Frame doesn't have the emotional core to bring through its themes.