Review: Out of the frying pan and into the fire!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 22, 2013
This book took me by surprise that's for sure, not what I expecting at all, but that's not a bad thing! Who wants to read a predictable novel?Anyway Admiral's Tribulation is a somewhat darker story than the first two entries into the Spineward Sectors Series with some pretty grim scenes and is for the main told from the Point of View's of just about everybody except Jason Montagne the 'Little Admiral' who until now has been our main protagonist; also of note in this story "Anyone Can Die." has been turned up to 10 and applied with wild abandon! So this is really a different animal when compared to Admiral Who and Admiral's Gambit.The Politics of the universe are exposed and explored a little more and darn is it a murky and cut-throat game with just about everything we thought we knew from the earlier books turned on its head.I don't want to give too much away but all in all this is a high tempo story once the action starts, tightly written with some great competent villains. Not a lot of the ship to ship naval type battles we've seen, much more focused on boarding actions.Finishing the last book my musings were more focused on what Jason and his allies could be doing to rebuild the Confederation Navy, setting up an Academy, recruiting people both skilled/retirees and trainees from all those border worlds and so on, sure the attack on the pirate base was going to be a big deal but . . . that's not what this book is about.Here we have the story of an operation going pretty badly wrong and everybody going above and beyond trying to salvage something from the rubble and its very well told IMHO tears, terror and triumph! . . . although the triumph is more about skin of the teeth survival than any big gains.Criticisms . . . ok Jason in the beginning of the book was particularly weak and ineffectual I thought, a sharp right turn from his normal MO, ignoring some pretty obvious warnings and clues that things were'n't exactly what they looked like and shouting and scoring points when he should have been listening and planning. Sure a lot of it he thought he couldn't do anything about but even so this was not Jason Montagne at his best.The same can be said about Jason's XO/CoS, although in Tremblay's case I can forgive him a little since he was so desperate to believe he was finally being rescued from his royalist hell and welcomed back into the bosom of parliamentary service that he glossed over a lot of the warning signs I guess.This was a great book one that I'm sure to read again and again I also have high hopes for Jason bringing his A game back for the next book, the snippet of Admiral's Trial at the end is pretty hardcore.