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Title | The First Casualty
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Author | Mike Moscoe
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Cover Art | Scott Grimando
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Publisher | Ace - 1999
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First Printing | Ace - 1999
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Title | The Price of Peace
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Author | Mike Moscoe
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Cover Art | Scott Grimando
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Publisher | Ace - 2000
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First Printing | Ace - 2000
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Title | They Also Serve
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Author | Mike Moscoe
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Cover Art | Scott Grimando
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Publisher | Ace - 2001
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First Printing | Ace - 2001
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Title | To Do or Die
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Author | Mike Shepherd
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Cover Art | Scott Grimando
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Publisher | Ace - 2014
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First Printing | Ace - 2014
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Title | Rita Longknife: Enemy Unknown
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Author | Mike Shepherd
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Cover Art | Scott Grimando
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Publisher | KL & MM Books - 2017
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First Printing | KL & MM Books - 2017
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Title | Rita Longknife: Enemy in Sight
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Author | Mike Shepherd
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Illustrator | Scott Grimando
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Publisher | KL & MM Books - 2017
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First Printing | KL & MM Books - 2017
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Category | Science Fiction
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Warnings | None
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Main Characters | Ray Longknife, Terrence Tordon, Rita Nuu, Ruth, Izzy Umboto, Mary Rodrigo
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Main Elements | Military SF
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Website | ---
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 The First Casualty
Two green draftees of the Society of Humanity. Two career soldiers invested with the cause of the United Colonies. These four soldiers on opposing sides of battle are about to discover the true nature of this terrible war--a quest for profit--from the high command of both sides. What they will risk is nothing less than their lives. For although truth is the first casualty of war, it won't be the last.
The Price of Peace
Izzy Umboto is a hero the conflict between the Society of Humanity and the Unity Party. Instead of retiring and living out her days quietly, she's wrangled command of her very own warship. Unfortunately, that ship is the less-than-state-of-the-art Patton.
Lieutenant Terrence Tordon, called "Trouble" by his enemies, his friends, and even himself, is a career marine. The word "quit" isn't in his vocabulary.
Now Lieutenant Trouble and his troops have signed on with Commander Umboto, trading a higher paycheck for the promise of action.
For all is not well in the galaxy. On the scattering of planets along the rim, remnant thugs of the Unity Party still hold power. In the shipping lanes of rim space, pirates roam freely.
Umboto and Tordon will soon learn that enforcing the peace can be just as expensive as fighting the war - and the cost will be counted in human lives...
They Also Serve
Colonel Ray Longknife and Marine Captain Mary Rodrigo were once enemies in an interstellar war. Now they're working together to keep the peace. But can they protect themselves from an enemy they can't even see?
When a bad space jump flings their starship thousands of light-years away from home, Longknife and Rodrigo make an amazing discovery: a planet inhabited by the descendants of a ship's crew - lost three hundred years earlier.
As acting ambassador, Longknife is eager to welcome the planet's population back into the fold of humanity. But Rodrigo is suspicious. She senses that something is wrong hunder the planet's veneer of peace of prosperity. And she's right...
To Do or Die
Retired Colonel Ray Longknife and Marine Captain Terrence "Trouble" Tordon come to Savannah via different routes, but what they find is the same. One bully strongman is intent on keeping power no matter what the new rules are for peace. He’s got the population cowered by thugs, and tanks at the ready. He expects to win the coming elections handily.
He doesn’t expect trouble. Or, in this case, Mrs. Trouble—aka Ruth Tordon—a Marine wife on a mission to find the drug lords that almost killed her and her husband and put them out of business—and she’s not about to be stopped by some barely trained roughnecks.
Abandoned by their strongman and desperate in defeat, the heavy armor get ready to roll into town over anybody in their way. But Ray Longknife, Trouble and Ruth are standing in their way…and nothing is going to flatten them.
Rita Longknife: Enemy Unknown
The war is over. Hurray!
Half the fleet is back in mothballs. But out on the rim of human space, ships are disappearing.
Some are merchant ships going about their business. Others are exploration ships on deep space probes. What's happening to them?
Captain Rita Nuu Longknife is ready to take the heavy cruiser Exeter to space and see what's out there.
She may have a nursery next to the captain's cabin, and a two month old baby on her hip, but she's taking a warship out there and nobody better get in her way.
Rita Longknife: Enemy in Sight
The victory parades are over and half the fleet is back in mothballs. The Navies better start getting them back in Commission! Rita Longknife, commander of the heavy cruiser Exeter, has proof. Proof that there is something else out there. Proof we are not alone in the galaxy. Aboard her ship is evidence that we have blown up an alien ship, and they have blown up one of ours. So far, contact with the aliens is being made by pirates, the worst scum humanity has. How do the right people take over making contact? Is there already too much bad blood between us. Have we already bungled first contact?
I decided to read the entire Kris Longknife series this year, but since that part of the series was already long I decided to save the Jump Universe for another time. But the more I read the Kris books, the more I wondered if I was missing something I should know about Ray and Trouble. A couple generations have passed, so in the Kris books we hear the legends they became, but not the men they were. Thought it might be interesting to go back to the beginning, after all the Jump Universe books were written first so as a reader I'm sort of expected to know this stuff already.
Now this is military SF. See I started the Kris books since I needed to fill a "Military SF/F" slot in a reading challenge BINGO slot, and at 8 or 9 books in, I couldn't find one where it was really hard military stuff, she's mostly playing the princess or off going rogue and not following the rules. She's navy but other than donning the uniform from time to time, it didn't really feel it. The First Casualty solved that problem, definitely all military. You've got your space battles, your ground battles, finding ways to survive when the military had to cut corners and didn't provide what you needed. How you can go from wanting to make peace to wanting to wipe the enemy off the face of the Earth, and then realizing what that actually means if you do that.
It was interesting going back and learning about characters that were already great-grandfathers by the time we meet them, here they are as young men, meeting their wives to be. In particular I enjoyed meeting Ruth, I'd wondered about the story of the farmer's daughter who became a marine's wife. Trouble is different too, he gains a sense of humour somewhere along the way but he's all business here. And the third book mentions the Three for the first time, and the planet Santa Maria (which the character Tom came from) which has alien tech. I enjoyed this one the most. By the time I got to the fourth book I'd seen our protagonists go in and clean up a corrupt planet several times before so there was nothing really new here though it left a nice teaser in the last couple of pages.
However like the Kris Longknife books, they were good but I didn't adore them. One big critique is that the villains are very two-dimensional moustache twirling sadists. The woman in The Price of Peace was just over the top, I mean sure there can be people like that, but it makes a story so much more engaging if your villain isn't pure evil but you can almost see their point of view. This continued a bit in the Kris books, a few characters managed to grow out of their caricature but the villains ran an empire of planets as if they were Nazis or Communists (and hey, most characters from those planets had German or Russian names, go figure). Same here, if someone was bad, he was really really bad, outright insane. The one interesting quirk was that while there were two sides to the conflict, it wasn't one side or the other that was the "villain", in fact we'd jump back and forth between both sides, making us care for both of them. It was the ones manipulating things.
I was excited however to learn more about how the Itichee war came about. Not sure about the covers though, Rita is Navy, not commando, if you're looking for the main character to whip out some weapons while being leather-clad, you'll be disappointed.
The series also doesn't end. Shepherd clearly intended a third Rita book but guess it never happened. I mean we know what happens next, more or less, from the Kris Longknife series. But just as we finally get to really meet the Itichee for the first time, we're left to fill in the blanks ourselves.
They were great for a one time read but I'll pass them along to someone else to enjoy as there are just too many to invest time in a second round.
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