No Honor in Death (Siobhan Dunmoore, #1)

by Eric Thomson

[EBookObsessed]

This was an enjoyable military/Scifi. I am looking forward to checking out the rest of the series.

Note I listened to an audiobook presentation so character spelling doesn’t count.

If you like Star Trek, you should definitely give this series a try. I should indicate that any similarities to Star Trek are very loosely based since the only things that were truly similar were certain points where there was lucky escapes. Instead of Star Trek’s science vessel, Stingray is a military ship.

Humans are in a war against the Shrehari. We offered them peace and they looked down at us lesser beings and declared war, but they are finding that it is quite difficult to defeat us.

Siohban Dunmoore was first officer on the Victoria Regina when her friend and Captain is killed during a battle against one of the Shrehari’s most powerful commanders, Brical of Tolvikash. With so much damage to the ship, Siobhan takes command and decides to ram her ship into the Shrehari’s destroyer rather than wait to destroyed by the next blast. Since the Shrehari also sustained damage, Brical decides to leave rather than blast the Victoria Regina one final time. He even hails the ship and acknowledges the now deceased Captain and Siohban as worthy adversaries.

Upon returning to the nearest space station, Siohban is given the command of the Stingray. The other admirals wanted to decommission the “jinxed” ship and reassign her crew, but Admiral Negira is a supporter of Siobhan and her unorthodox fighting abilities and gives her the ship.

But Siobhan has her work cut out for her. The former captain, a woman who was a classmate of Siobhan, was given the command for her family connections rather then her abilities to command a ship. Her crew has been demoralized and since the former captain is up on charges, the crew fears retribution if they answer any of Siobhan’s many, many questions of how the ship was run, including the First Officer Gregor Pushkin, who had hoped that he would be given the command. At first she thinks they are simply evasive once she finds out that the former captain ignored the distress call of the Victoria Regina and the crew doesn’t want to admit that they turned away and let Siobhan’s crew die but there might be much more going on.

Not only is there no cohesiveness to the crew, someone is trying to make sure her ship can’t make her deadline to arrive at the border. Siobhan pulls out the stop to get the ship ready and get the crew back into fighting shape, and they begin to hesitantly hope for future of Stingray.

When they are ready, she takes them into enemy territory. Knowing that the Shrehari are very regimented in their tactics, she is looking for a caravan of soldiers and supplies. She stalks it like a jungle cat on prey waiting for it to come out of its hyperjump, but she isn’t the only one stalking. Commander Brical knows that the sneaky humans will use their stringent protocols against them and he is stalking the caravan as well waiting for someone to take a shot.

I enjoyed watching the Stingray’s crew come together and learn to trust their new captain to keep them safe both from the dangers of the Shrehari as well as their own navy. I also liked that as we met Siobhan and spent time with Brical, these two might have been friends if they were not at war. There was a lot of similarity between the human navy and the Shrehari. The privileged getting commands when they haven’t earn them. Their own navy putting spies on the ship. Brical also fought against his own Admirals against their need to use a rule book at all times. He tries to get them to see that the humans are very creative in their fighting and that they humans will win the war unless the Shrehari can out strategize them.

I enjoyed the audiobook. Eric Michael Summerer did a great job of providing different voices to everyone and you could easily follow who was talking. It could have used some special effects though. I am sure they could have found starship sound effect buttons somewhere.

I am interested to see what happens now that the crew is behind Siobhan.