First new Honor Jarrington novel in five years!
New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal and international
best-selling phenomenon David Weber delivers book 14 in the multiple
New York Times best-selling Honor Harrington series, the first new
Honor Harrington novel since 2013's Shadow of Freedom.
The Solarian League's navy counts its superdreadnoughts by the
thousands. Not even its own government knows how enormous its economy
truly is. And for hundreds of years, the League has borne the banner of
human civilization, been the ideal to which humanity aspires in its
diaspora across the galaxy.
But the bureaucrats known as the "Mandarins," who rule today's League,
are not the men and women who founded it so long ago. They are corrupt,
venal, accountable to no one...and they've decided the upstart Star
Kingdom of Manticore must be destroyed.
Honor Harrington has worn the Star Kingdom's uniform for half a century
and served her monarch and her people well. In the course of those
years, the woman the newsies call the Salamander has grown from a
tactically brilliant but politically naïve junior officer to supreme
fleet command and a seat on the highest military and political councils
of the Grand Alliance.
Very few people know war the way Honor Harrington does. Very few have
lost as many men and women, as many friends, as much family as she has.
Yet despite that, hers has been a voice of caution. She knows the
Mandarins and the Solarian League Navy are growing increasingly
desperate as the truth of their technological inferiority sinks home,
but she also knows the sheer size of the League. And she knows how its
citizens will react if the Grand Alliance takes the war to the League,
attacks its star systems, destroys its infrastructure...kills its
civilians. Today's victory, bought on those terms, can only guarantee a
future war of revenge against a resurgent Solarian League and its navy.
The League is sliding toward inglorious defeat as it steadily loses
ground in the Protectorates and the Verge. As its central government
teeters toward bankruptcy and even some of its core systems opt to
secede in the face of the Mandarins' corruption. As the Solarian Navy
finally realizes it cannot face an Alliance battle fleet and win.
But the Mandarins have embraced a desperate new strategy, and in pursuit
of that strategy, the SLN has committed atrocities such as the galaxy
has not known in a thousand years. The League have violated its own
Eridani Edict against mass civilian casualties, violated the Deneb
Accords prohibition on war crimes.
And they have finally killed too many of the people Honor Harrington
loves.
Hers is the voice of caution and compromise no longer, and the galaxy is
about to see something it has never imagined.
The Salamander is coming for the Solarian League, and Hell is coming in
her wake.
