The Anniversary Day extended story arc. This is book 3 and goes extensively ionto the back story of the clones terrprists who bombed the moon domes. ( )

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. In fact I'm bummed the next installment isn't out until next Tuesday. I've pre-ordered it and should have it at midnight. ( )

And time for the new Retrieval Artist novel. It got delayed (the previous one was in 2012) because Rusch decided to write 6 of them at the same time and to publish them one per month this year. From what I read here, the decision was not half bad.

That is the first Retrieval Artist novel without Miles (and actually without any of the characters we know). Rusch expected that this will cause issues so she she explained the reasons in a preface - including the 6 novels plan, how this is a Universe story and not Miles story and so on. Which was unnecessary if you ask me but then people get mad for lesser things so who knows.

Anyway - back to the book. It is the third in the Anniversary Saga although the action starts 15 years before the event (but then jumps to the time of the attack and continues from there). It can be read as a first book if one so wishes (some references will be lost but not too much) but it is not a standalone as the end is a cliffhanger. And technically it ties the book to the previous ones even more tightly. So I would not recommend someone to start here - backtrack at least 2 books.

Meet Judita Gomez - one of the marshals of the Earth Alliance that is tasked with the not always pleasant job of dealing with the problems along the Frontier - the worlds that are close enough to the alliance to be reachable but that are not part of the alliance yet. And these worlds include a lot of new aliens and races. And with the way the law in the alliance works, this pretty much means that she can get killed for just stepping in the wrong place - so she had learned to be very cautious. And one day she gets a call from a Frontier planet where humans seems to be killing other humans - and the locals would really like the alliance to come and deal with the matter. Except that the humans turn out to be clones and things go a little weird, reports get filed and it ends up being just one of the many adventures she had lived through. Fast forward to 15 years later and the Moon is attacked... and Judita realizes that the old story from 15 years ago have some bearing to the now and here.

What follows is a two-pronged story - one of the clones from that colony's and Judita's. Judita decides to investigate what happened and why noone paid any attention to it; the clone is fighting for his life and a lot of people get in the crossfire. Conspiracy seems to be a word invented for exactly this kind of scenarios.

When I finished reading the book I realized that I did not even miss Miles. Or Noelle. Or anyone from the old crowd. I will love seeing them working with the new people we met here but... they were not missed. The universe that Rusch had created with its population of humans (some of them crazier than others) and aliens; with its legal system and with the Alliance being there to tie the things together has taken on a life of its own and somewhere along the lines had become the main character of the series.

I loved the book - it was airy and exactly what I needed. So... let's see what happens next month. ( )