Ky Vatta is a highly promising military cadet with a great future ahead of her, until an insignificant act of kindness makes her the focus of the Academy’s wrath. She is forced to resign, her dreams shattered.

For the child of a rich trading family, this should mean disgrace on a grand scale. And yet, to her surprise, Ky is offered the captaincy of a ship headed for scrap with its final cargo.

Her orders are absolutely clear, but Ky quickly sees potential profit in altering the journey. Because, whatever the risks, it’s in her blood to trade – even if the currency is extreme danger.

IN A NUTSHELL
A fun, overcoming-the-odds adventure that twists the Military Sci Fi trope in interesting ways, has an engaging young woman as the lead character, is fast-paced, exciting, and has skilful world-building and reasonably well-rounded characters. It kept me turning the pages and left me eager for more. 

I hadn’t meant to read ‘Trading In Danger’. I was just going to read the Kindle sample so that I could decide whether I wanted to buy it. It got its hooks into me at once, and not only did I read the whole thing, but I bought the rest of the five-book series.

This is the kind of exhilarating but thought-provoking Space Opera that I love. I loved that it twisted the Military SF tropes by having our rising-star space cadet dismissed from the academy in the opening scenes. This isn’t what is supposed to happen to a competent, talented, dedicated heroine, especially when her name is Vatta, and the series is called Vatta’s War. 

Then it turned out that Ky Vatta is an heiress to a major space shipping company, and she’s been given the captaincy of a ship with instructions to take it on a last milk run before having it scrapped. That didn’t sound very exciting, so I was already waiting for Ky to do something different and for things to go wrong. She did, and they did, and suddenly I was in an exciting struggle with an inexperienced captain and a civilian crew, finding themselves in a war zone. There was sabotage, explosions, mercenaries, rogue ships, mutinies and no means of communicating with home. 

Ky’s inexperience helped with the world-building as old hands explained things to her. Her military training gave her the background to grasp what was going on and explain it to others. In the end though, it was her character that got her through. Ky is placed in a situation where she has to make rapid life-or-death decisions with limited data and almost no resources. She doesn’t get everything right, but she discovers something important about herself: she feels alive under pressure, combat thrills her and killing the bad guys not only causes her qualms but gives her moments of euphoria. She’s a little ashamed to discover that, as the daughter of a  merchant house with a reputation for honesty and a commitment to trade and profit, she is a natural warrior and killer.

I enjoyed the fast pace of the plot. I admired how real the technology and the trading environment seemed (think C. J Cherryh’s ‘Chanur’ series, but with enough twists to make it distinctive). The problems that Ky faced were engaging and complicated, and I enjoyed watching her solve them. I also liked the way each problem solved revealed a bigger, more dangerous picture that I was eager to know more about. 

It was a very satisfying start to an exciting and entertaining series.