Who would have thought it? A New Frontier novel which is actually good. I'd say I don't know how it happened, but I do know. For one, it's told in first person, so the slavering depiction of Mackenzie Calhoun which so drags down the other books is necessarily absent. It has to be, else he'd come across as so up himself he'd be intolerable. Secondly, he's on a different ship with a different crew and they come across as people, all of them, instead of a walking collection of quirks that's turned the New Frontier bunch into caricatures. And finally, this story is a tragedy and it's treated as a tragedy, which means the tone is far more believable than it is in the other books, which often undermine the seriousness of events with a very uneven voice in that regard.

Why David's written six volumes of that dreck when he can produce work of this calibre is beyond me. This is light years ahead of the rest of the New Frontier series.