To me, a good book that keeps one's interest all the way through and ends with a contented glow for the reader is a treasure beyond par. Master Author David Drake provides that in spades. This is the second book of the Leary series (With the Lightnings precedes it) where Lt. Leary retains command of his vessel and is assigned a mission which would daught many of his superiors. With his crack crew, Adele Mundy, Hogg and Tovera he proceeds to accomplish his mission in ways that the Commodore he is assigned to would never imagine. This, as referenced above, is a good book well worth reading.
The Army took David Drake from Duke Law School and sent him on a motorized tour of Viet Nam and Cambodia with the 11th Cav, the Blackhorse. He learned new skills, saw interesting sights, and met exotic people who hadn’t run fast enough to get away.
Dave returned to become Chapel Hill’s Assistant Town Attorney and to try to put his life back together through fiction making sense of his Army experiences.
Dave describes war from where he saw it: the loader’s hatch of a tank in Cambodia. His military experience, combined with his formal education in history and Latin, has made him one of the foremost writers of realistic action SF and fantasy. His bestselling Hammer’s Slammers series is credited with creating the genre of modern Military SF. He often wishes he had a less interesting background.
Dave lives with his family in rural North Carolina.
http://david-drake.com/2011/biographies/
