Review: A story of Karma
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 5, 2013
This book takes our hero from the realm of being an amazingly lucky person who you could claim just fell into the right circumstances and firmly establishes that he deserves to be "the" admiral. Push came to shove and we see the admiral hit rock bottom. It's a comeback-from-the-brink story where every good thing that happens to him to salvage his life and title may not have been orchestrated by him... but was the direct result of some good deed or smart decision he had made previously.A great add to the series. 4 stars instead of 5 because a big part of the book is courtroom drama (it is called "Admiral's Trial" after all) instead of space battles and building up the legacy of the MPF. Finishes strong though... was just a necessary point in the story I suppose and the author finds his way back to what makes the story great.Good:-Humor/Battles/Trickery/Valor/Suffering/Innovation, all the good stuff is in here.-Rich character development of the Admiral-Lots of screen time for engineer Spalding, I like his character and also the impact of being half-droid-The Lucky Clover as a ship gets some very interesting backstory/complication-The author published this story VERY quickly after book 4 Admiral's Tribulation-Some very interesting things are teased and hinted at (e.g. Droids, AI, special swords, what's really going on w/the bad guys)-Tracto-ans, gotta love `em-Admiral gains more supporters with their own decent character development-More of the excellent space conflicts we've come to love in this series-The end was in a good place and the teaser chapters for the next book really helped soften the blow on having the cutoff at a high-point-Author does a good job on the lengthy dialoguesBad:-No real time with Akantha-The timeline seems to have consistency issues (maybe this is so the author can forestall the Akantha events)-Lots of screen time dedicated to First Officer (or whatever he is now) Tremblay, a boring unlikeable character that's simply used as a convenient plot device-Like Tremblay, the whole "Morale Officer" character is just a boring trope-Editing seemed to be worst of the whole series to date and distracted me many times (missing words, repeated words, a lot of comma mistakes) Note: This is a price I'll gladly pay to read the story sooner.-I personally feel viewpoints could have been juggled better. We the reader are given full view of everything, but then the author wastes a lot of time having the various characters "go through the motions" to catch up and discover what we know. It is a lot of page time just waiting on people to learn stuff, watching them set up and scheme for stuff they don't need, or other such inefficient waste of the readers' time.I listed quite a bit in the bad column but don't get a negative impression. That's more so the author will consider these rough edges and polish them out in the next book as I see he regularly prowls amazon. The story was great despite the author having to take us through what could have easily been a (necessary) lull in the arc.  It's "more of the same" story we've come to love without being "just more of the same".Given where this story leaves us I think the next book is likely to be the best in the series.