Victorious closes out the Lost Fleet series with a satisfying win for everyone involved. Geary is finally back home, but the war isn't over. After a brief interview with the Alliance government to ensure he's not planning a coup, Geary and the fleet are sent back to Syndicate space to negotiate a peace treaty: status quo ante bellum, given that both sides battered themselves nearly to pieces for negligible gains.

The Syndics are truly desperate, throwing even the metaphorical kitchen sink at Geary. In classic style, he spots and outwits a ploy to turn the Syndicate home system into a immense trap using a hypernet gate bomb, dealing with three sided negotiations with the Syndicate government before blowing up the last hostile mobile force in human space.

The battle isn't over, because lacking the central authority of a fleet, the Syndics are splinting into successor states, and the enigma aliens on the far side of human space are making impossible demands. Geary takes the fleet into battle against an unknown foe, and makes a major breakthrough. The aliens are not noticeably superior to humanity: their vaunted impossibly good stealth technology is actual a virus installed in human's sensors. With this knowledge, Geary wins the first battle against the aliens, hopefully foreclosing that threat for now. And in the end, he gets to go home and put down the crown of command for a month, get married to Captain Tanya Desjani, and have a honeymoon.

So the series as a whole: They're definitely fast, light reads. Geary is a hero who manages to take common decency and skill and turn them into something extraordinary. There's some cool mysteries and action sequences, and a nod to realism in the space battles. However, a lot of stuff, both technical and in terms of characterization, is rather light and skimpy. Unlike some other milSF, Campbell knows how to write, knows that warcrimes are bad, and that democracy, while not perfect, is the best form of government we have. If you like space navy stuff, I definitely recommend this series.

*** SERIES SUMMARY REREAD ***

I read the first six Lost Fleet books while sick, and they really excelled when I could barely muster the energy to think in straight lines, let alone turn the page. These aren't complex stories, but they've got their heart in the right place, and they keep the pacing fast without getting bogged down into long description or infodumps. Sure, they're formulaic, with Geary crunching through obstacles with the power of honor and tactics, but it's a solid formula. Weirdly, I had zero memory of anything beyond book #2, but that just added to the reread pleasure.