text: I didn't have especailly high hopes for this book. I think there has been a gradual decline in the quality of HH books over the years, and this one brings it to a new low. Basically, it's waaaaaay too long. At 850 pages, it's a monster read, and a slow one. That's not always a bad thing - sometimes if you like the characters it's nice to just hang out with your friends for page after page. But not here. Why is it necessary to describe in detail the exact movements of a treecat using sign language? For several paragraphs? More than once? Why are we given pages of liturgy for religious services? I think I'd be in a very small minority when I confess that I quite like the 1662 Prayer Book, though I can't quite work out why it would be revived in the distant future when it's been out of use here for decades! Maybe it was easy to cut and paste, and got the word count up.
  
  And then there's the space combat - a strength of the series, especially the first three or four. But there's the rub - there are only so many ways you can describe a spaceship blowing up. By the 11th book in the series I can't be the only person out there whose eyes are beginning to glaze over when we get to the battle sequences.
  
  But the big problem - spoiler alert! - is the way in which Weber solves the love triangle we left the last book with. Honor loves Hamish. Emily loves Hamish. Hamish loves Honor and Emily. What to do? It turns out that there's an easy solution. After about 400 pages of agonising (not to mention most of the previous book) it seems that Honor can marry them both. A bit outre? Seemingly not - apparently such arrangements fall well within the accepted norms of Manticoran law and custom. (Although we've never had a whiff of this before.) But what really gets me is that the reason it didn't happen about halfway through the last book is that (get this), gosh, no-one thought of it. It seems that no-one ever told Mr Weber that if you shoot someone with a gun in Act V, the gun better have been hanging on the wall in Act I.
  
  All-in-all, I can only say, please Mr Weber. It is time to bring the series to an end. Please do it soon
  