Space themed milSF with an exceptionally competent young woman protagonist is practically its own sub-genre. Trading in Danger is a solid entry in that tradition, with the strengths of a great deal of psychological realism, but also a grander plot that steals agency from its main character.

We meet Ky Vatta on the worst day of her life so far. She's being summarily expelled from the Space Navy Academy as a scapegoat when a good deed blows up into a public relations catastrophe. Plan B for Ky isn't so bad, as her family runs a major interstellar shipping company, and she's handed the captain's slot on an elderly freighter sent for decommissioning.

It's a milk run, but Ky has the Vatta legacy to live up to, and when she hears about a profitable gig moving agricultural machiney, she decides to go off route and freelancer. Ship trouble leaves her stranded in a system as a war kicks off, and local ansible relay is destroyed (the kind of attack that attracts serious retaliation by the ansible monopoly) and her ship is contracted by mercenaries to act as floating prison for senior officers of other civilian ships. Nothing illegal, just keeping potential troublemakers from causing trouble all over the system.

Of course, that means that they cause trouble on Ky's ship. Some of the senior officers turn out to be behind the attack, and they attempt to hijacker her ship. Ky shoots the attempted hijackers down and loses a respected crewman in the process. But her ship is disabled, out of fuel, and with no beacon, and it's down to starvation rations before they're rescued.

So I'm torn about this book. Ky is a fun protagonist, and while she's good under pressure, she's not an uncanny prodigy like Miles Vorkosigan, Honor Harrington, or Alexis Carew. The problem is that even at her worst moment, Vatta has immense privilege. On phone call to Daddy could unlock all the credits she'd ever need. Mentors shower her with mysteriously useful items. And finally, and I know this is griping complaint, but the premise is 'space truckers', and I never got much sense of the economics of the setting, aside from a lovely monologue from the ansible monopoly company's rep about how they are entirely apolitical, because they own politics. Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn series nails the economics and politics of space shipping so well (even if the plot and characters are... so awful in places), that I'm just disappointed.

Ky is clearly being set up for some kind of unconventional war, and I have a hold placed on the next book, but while a lot of fun, this is just okay.