Your standard military science fiction. Pretty good battles. Based around Marines. Second in the series.

So this book is much more focused around pirates and space, rather than rebels & ground fight rebels like the first book.

The plot was okay, however I nearly gave up a few times due to the authors obsession with rape over all other forms of torture and violence. He just goes on and on about it, and barely mentions any other bad things.

He also seems to have a bit of an obsession with female slaves. They're everywhere, so much so I do wonder how exactly the pirates and other "baddies" in this series actually manage the logistics of transporting them around.

The enemies also have pretty bad motivations, and poor explanations as to why their societies manage to exist in a horrific statis. For example the pirates are supposed to knifing each other and performing coops all the time. But there's only 200 of them in a ship, and the ships are supposed to be fairly small... so surely you'd run out of people, or most of them would want to leave.

Also the pirates actually have commodities that they could trade and do what they're doing without all the violence. It was never really explained why they needed to keep terrorising everyone all the time.

I just struggle to see how the society could continue to exist.

It also feels a bit like the author is attempting to say something about society as a whole. Generally this comes across as poorly constructed straw men, about "them kids" being taught rights but not values in school, and them being lazy... very Grumpy old man.

I think the first book had a bit more politics and empire building, which made it a little better, and gave the book a context in the overall universe. This book seems to lack that.

Anyway. The fighting bits are pretty good. Everything else. Meh.