On Basilisk Station
By David Weber
Honor Harrington is the real deal. She is the daughter of two physicians who is advancing her way up through the Royal Manticoran Navy using hard work, integrity, tactical genius and yes…people skills. Her Captaincy on the HMS Fearless starts out rocky but through trials, discovering insurgencies and surgically bolstering her crew the ending is something you will enjoy.
Was that vague enough to keep the spoiler trolls at bay? Maybe. They will really hate this. There is a huge space battle at the end of this between Fearless and a really overcompensating Havenite ship that makes slogging through four hundred and nineteen pages absolutely worth it if large novels repel (scare) you. There, challenge thrown down.
The copy I read was a free promotion paperback that I got at Starfest 2013 but I went on and got the free kindle version to make me legit. The series has quite a lot of books so you will not run out of stories anytime soon. Also the RMN, Royal Manticoran Navy, is a fan group that as far as I know is US spanning and probably has some members in other countries. They attend Cons in costume and have a good time. This book is published by BAEN and it has some editing issues often associated with self or indie. That is the only issue for me to give it a four out of five stars. I enjoyed it.