At All Costs

Reviewer: Kat Allen

Author: David Weber

Published: 2005

Reviewed: 2006-02-17

Publisher: Baen


I'd forgotten how much I liked Honor Harrington. Even the soap opera
plots (many of which, for those of you who don't like them, resolve in
this book).

The cover honestly spoils an awful lot with respect to the soap opera
plot, since it's a scene from the final chapter of the book. Boo to
Baen. There aren't even any exploding spaceships.

So, yes. Honor and Hamish Alexander's love plot gets resolved, thanks
to the intervention of the lovely Emily. This is a good thing, as I
don't think Weber could have caused any more angst in that plot if he
tried.

The really good part of this book, however, is not the
Alexander-Harringtons, or their lovely children, but the really
interesting intrigues going on with Manpower Inc. Apparently they're
orchestrating rather a lot of the renewed hostilities between Haven
and Manticore. At this point, I'm not sure either of those two have
any really good way to find hard evidence of it, either, which means
that, in the war between Manticore and Haven, Manpower, Inc (and maybe
the Solarian League, if they cared, which they don't appear to) is
winning.

This is beautiful.

The descriptions of the battles are, as usual, stunning. I don't have
the eye for detail or the tactical sense to know whether Weber made
any mistakes, but I still really enjoy his realistic-sounding-to-a-
layperson battles.

In particular, the final battle in this book is really really
incredible---a nice portrayal of how it's really quite possible for
both sides to lose.

I'm going to be really interested to see how President Pritchard and
Admiral Theisman react to the huge success but eventual defeat of
their gigantic offensive at Manticore. I'll be more interested to see
what/who comes out of the woodwork to capitalize on the serious
depletion of both the Manticoran and Havenite navies.

Overall, I really enjoyed the book. I wish there were another in the
series I could read, but I'm not as voracious for this series as I am
for "A Song of Ice and Fire" anyway.