Heris Serrano was an officer born of a long line of officers, and a life serving in the ranks of the Regular Space Service was all she had ever known and all she ever wanted – until a treacherous superior officer forced her to resign her commission.

This was not just the end of a career path; it was the end of everything that gave her life meaning. But even ex-Fleet captains have to eat, and Heris finds employment as ‘Captain’ of an interstellar luxury yacht, working for the eccentric Lady Cecelia de Marktos. Being a rich old lady’s chauffeur isn’t quite the same as captaining a Fleet cruiser, but nothing Heris will ever do again will compare with that. Or so she thinks…

For all is not as it seems aboard the Sweet Delight. The smuggling ring is only the start of it. For on a visit to a seemingly innocuous pleasure planet, Heris stumbles across a very sinister hunting club and finds herself fighting for her life – and for the lives of friends she thought she’d never see agai

IN A NUTSHELL
A fine start to an unusual Space Opera series. Engaging characters, well-sustained suspense, Odd juxtapositions of spaceships, space stations, advanced weaponry, neo-Edwardian societal structure, and, weirdest of all, fox hunting. Add protagonists ranging from their late teens to their early eighties, a truly wicked baddie, moments of extreme peril and the uplifting feeling of knowing the good guys will win in the end, and you have the foundations for a unique series. 

After I’d spent a month binge-reading the seven books of Elizabeth Moon’s ‘Vatta’s War’ and ‘Vatta’s Peace’ series and found myself still hungry for more, I raided Elizabeth Moon’s back catalogue and found ‘Serrano’s Legacy‘, another seven-book Military-SF-with-a-twist series that she’d published a decade earlier.

I hesitated before I bought the first book, ‘Hunting Party’. 1993 feels like a long time ago now, but I reminded myself how much I’d enjoyed reading C. J Cherryh and Walter Jon Williams back then. I was also a little put off by the title of the series – who names the main character of a series after an Iberian cured ham? – but as it was Elizabeth Moon, I pressed the buy button anyway.

I’m glad that I did. ‘Hunting Party’ was an entertaining read. It was also not at all what I was expecting. Heris Serrano is not an earlier version of Ky Vatta, and ‘Serrano’s Legacy‘ isn’t aiming for the hard-edged, action-packed thiller territory that ‘Vatta’s War’ occupies. This is a gentler kind of story, still an adventure with lots of suspense as people I cared about were placed in peril, but with softer edges. 

In terms of plot, ‘Hunting Lodge’ worked as a standalone story, with a crisis escalating and a resolution arrived at, but the pacing was a little slow for a standalone novel. It only made sense when the role of the book was to establish a cast of characters and a societal setting that laid the foundation for a series.

What I liked most about the book was how it twisted the typical Military SF tropes. Almost all the main actors in the story were women, and most of them were civilians. Even though Heris Serrano was formerly a military commander, in this story, she was forced to adapt to operating according to the rules of the civilian world. 

The main characters ranged in age from late teens to early eighties. I liked the multiple points of view and diversity of experience and expectations that this produced. I especially liked seeing the young people reshape themselves as they worked to survive a life-threatening crisis. 

The neo-Edwardian societal setting of the story, the wealthiest families serving under a King, but having considerable autonomy, provided many opportunities to bring class dynamics into play. Although Serrano comes from a military family known for producing Admirals, she isn’t from the same aristocratic class as her employer or her employer’s young guests, and her crew are from much more working-class backgrounds. I liked the way the class divisions caused the main characters to have difficulty assessing one another and forced them to have to put in the effort to create relationships that would work under stress. 

For me, the most unusual aspect of the story was the time spent on fox hunting in the first half of the book. I enjoyed the vivid description of the hunt. It was clear that Elizabeth Moon knows horses and loves riding. Even so, I was wondering why, in a book I’d expected to be a Space Opera, the characters were spending so much time on a planet, riding horses to hunt genetically modified foxes. In terms of the series, this made sense. It gave Serrano an insight into the world of the very wealthy; it allowed her and her employer to bond over horse riding, and it established her employer as a renowned sportswoman who had persisted in and excelled at a sport that her family thought should not have been her priority. 

Even so, I was glad when the dastardly baddie emerged, the plot took a darker turn, and I was back reading a tense, suspenseful adventure. I enjoyed the second half of the book both for the excitement of the action and for the pleasure of watching the main characters adapt to survive. Although the plot had bad people doing terrible things to people who didn’t deserve it, and although the main characters were almost constantly at risk and lethal force was used frequently, this never became a truly dark tale. To my surprise, I found that I was grateful for that. It meant that the novel was an entertaining and exciting but still comfortable read, 

I can see that the Serrano’s Legacy series is going to be a quirky set of adventures, with a strong ensemble cast and some surprising juxtapositions. I’m looking forward to reading the next six books in the series, not just to see what Serrano does but to see how all the main characters develop.