TOIL AND TROUBLE IN THE CAULDRON OF GHOSTS
The Mesan Alignment: a centuries‑old cabal that seeks to impose its vision of a society dominated by genetic rank onto the human race. Now the conspiracy stands exposed by spies Anton Zilwicki and Victor Cachat—one an agent of Honor Harrington’s Star Kingdom of Manticore, the other a Havenite operative. The outing of the Alignment has turned the galaxy’s political framework topsy‑turvy. Old coalitions have disintegrated. New alliances have been born.
For starters, the long and hard‑fought war between the Republic of Haven and the Star Empire of Manticore is not only over, but these bitter enemies have formed a new pact. Their common foe: the Mesan Alignment itself.
But more information is needed to bring the Alignment out of the shadows. Now, defying the odds and relying on genetic wizardry themselves for a disguise, Zilwicki and Cachat return to Mesa—only to discover that even they have underestimated the Alignment’s ruthlessness and savagery.
Soon they are on the run in Mesa’s underworld, not only hunted by the Alignment but threatened by the exploding conflict on the planet between Mesa’s overlords and the brutalized slaves and descendants of slaves who have suffered under their rule for so long. But if Zilwicki and Cachat succeed in rooting out the ancient conspiracy, a great evil may be finally removed from the galaxy—and on a long‑oppressed planet, freedom may finally dawn.
Sequel to national bestsellers Torch of Freedom and Crown of Slaves, Book Three in the Crown of Slaves, ‑ Honor Harrington universe.
Listen to the authors discuss the book on the Baen Free Radio Hour: Part 1 | Part 2.
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Product ReviewBest in the series since Mission of Honor.
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Product ReviewEnds in the middle! Looking forward to next one in the series.
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Product ReviewSPOILERS:
Overall better than than the last few books which were jammed packed with filler to the point of only having 2-6 paragraphs of new material. This seems like it has been a ongoing thing since the new genetic villains were introduced in 2005 with At All Costs. I guess this is when David Weaber checked out of this series.
The first 30% of this book is more of the same. With one complete chapter lifted word for word from previous books. I just reread this book with crown and torch in the correct order and god is the writing quality in stark contrast. This one is hands down the worst of the three and highlights just how little the main characters play a part in the book.
The new added plot lines introduces mesas cardboard cutout villains in a slightly more human light, gets interesting and just ends.... At about 60% through the book.
Very disappointed, why do they keep adding still more characters that no one cares about and do not in anyway progress the storyline?
The main characters are Anton Zilwicki and Victor Cachat yet they are not in this book, Anton Zilwicki is riding around a yacht for 95% of the book and basically only appears as a cameo. Even Victor Cachat only makes a slight appearance.
The "main" reverse "dredd" / "the raid" story is fairly well done but again does not focus very much on the main characters. Enjoyed the parts about the tower fight.
But in the end it seems like they hit the required word count in their contract, tacked on two shoddy chapters to wrap things up and said...
BAM, DONE, OFF TO THE PRESSES
WOW it looks like I wrote a new David Weber book by copying my review for the earc, adding a few things and putting it here.Posted on
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Product ReviewThis was pretty good, better than I had feared from some of the comments. Yes, it does have some repetitive material. Too bad. You can skip that. But the new material it has is actually, in my opinion, extremely interesting. It has a lot of the charm of the Crown of Slaves book by these same two authors--interesting banter, some interesting philosophical and political ideas, and somewhat interesting characters. It also advances the story a lot more than, say, Shadow of Freedom. All in all, it kept me up quite late reading it.
In the end, it was a little disappointing in that I'm not sure what was accomplished; all that interesting setup led to a bunch of people dying (as usual in these stories), the bad guys doing some really bad things, the good guys temporarily on the ascendancy, but not unfortunately because of the efforts of the main characters.Posted on
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Product ReviewI particularly enjoyed how Weber has knitted some of the threads from other books in the series. Not that the story line hasn't turned, which is good, because this is an interesting turn that I can see developing in challenging ways. Honor is fun, but futures blossom as Weber's Honorverse has, allowing us to envision almost a real universe.
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Product ReviewIf you're following the total story arc, you'll need to read the book. But the story does not move forward very far. And no loose ends from previous books are addressed. I very much did not care for the character development of Queen Berry. In this book she is a bubblehead whiny teenager who spends half her time pouting and the other half vacant eyed clueless. Her vocabulary has been pretty much reduced to one word: "Huh".
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Product ReviewThis book is well named - its a ghost of what the Honorverse novels used to be. Any book by Weber that now contains the 'Detweiler reacts' chapter - for which I swear Weber must have a macro he hits when his word count isn't high enough - loses one star automatically. Minus another star for trying to pass a short epilogue off as an entire chapter. If you haven't guessed yet, I think the quality of the recent Honorverse novels has dropped a lot in recent years. Like all of the recent novels, this one spends perhaps a third of the story rehashing events already covered in previous volumes from a slightly different perspective - Zilwicki and Cachat's in this case, at least primarily. I thought the reactions of these two and the Manticoran public actually during the Solly invasion would have been interesting; sadly, this is not present. The portions of the book dealing with espionage, urban combat, and the boarding of the space station are interesting and a good read, but overall, Cauldron feels like space filler between Shadow of Freedom and whatever comes next, particularly since it cuts off right as the fleet arrives at Mesa.
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