Vigiliant is finally a real League of People's book, a high tech mystery on a planet inhabited by multiple species, and a long and forgotten past. The mystery takes a while to get moving, as our narrator Faye describes living through a terrible plague that targeted the avian Ooloom, before it was cured by her father, using ordinary olive oil. When her father was killed in a mining collapse, Faye acted out as hard a teenager could, but at the start of the action, she's gotten her life together and is a member of Vigil, a unique branch of government with the power to look into any official business and to objectively state how a proposed policy will work.

Faye's thrilling career investigating water plant refurbishment is sidelined when a team of androids try to assassinate her. Yeah, Rule #1 of the League of Peoples is that murder is impossible, or binds the perpetrator to a single planet. Faye investigates the attacks with a crazy Ooloom senior investigator, and Admiral Festina Ramos of Expendable. What she finds is, well, the soul of the world, machines with feelings, the origins of the plague, and how her father really died.

Gardner definitely has a pattern in his capable-but-emotionally-damaged protagonists, but he has a keen ear for character, and its fun to see the setting expand. Not as good as Expendable, better than Commitment Day.