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Title: Like reading an 800 page CSPAN transcript
Review: David Weber can't write dialog. All his characters share the same voice, and it's the voice of a particularly boring PoliSci professor. This book is about 50% dialog.David Weber can't write any sort of descriptive or background material that isn't so dry and wooden that it sheds splinters. This book is about 45% of that. Never has political intrigue been so leaden.Let's not even mention the attempts at humor or romance. Those are just too painful to mention.David Weber does one thing well -- great big space opera battles, with missles flying, lasers flashing, ending (usually) with virtue rewarded and stupidity punished. This book devotes a handful of pages to this. A very poor reward for wading through an ineptly edited and infinitely tedious description of the politics of an imaginary Star Kingdom.
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