Hunting Party (Serrano Legacy Series #1) Book

A thoroughly enjoyable space opera romp, with great female lead character, good secondary characters, interesting plot archs and enjoyable writing style. A very promising #1 in a series.

Heris Serrano comes from a long line of officers in the "R. S. S." (I'm afraid I have forgotten what the acronym stands for, but you get the idea), who has resigned her commission in disgrace and is in the process of finding her way in the civilian world.

The story starts as she takes up a post as captain on a rich and influential old woman's luxury yacht and here the author starts with the intriguing literary dance of developing these two main characters for us as they both discover that their pre-conceptions of each other are wrong and as they build a friendship.

The luxury yacht, the Sweet delight is one of Heris' first challengers. It's previous captain has a slack crew with agenda's of its own that Heris must sort out, trying her best to modify her service attitude to a civilian ship. On the yacht are a small clutch of young people accompanying Ronnie, her employer's nephew into an exile of disgrace. Entitled and arrogant, Ronnie needs to be taken down a peg and Heris' methods of civilizing her employer's bratty young nephew are pure delight to read (don't we all know someone who could benefit from a bit of a bit of re-education).

The grand finale of the novel occurs on the destination planet where a grand 'fox hunting' season is in progress. It turns out that other and more sinister hunting is happening on the planet...

Accidentally, I read the #2 in this series before the #1. This in no way prevented me from enjoying it thoroughly, but at the end I was very keen to read this, the first novel in the series. It did not disappoint, setting a fun pace with good storytelling and characterisation. I do, at times, feel as though the story bulked out at bit more than maybe the author expected and I would have been happy to have more of the final hunt. It felt a little as though Moon spent more time than expected on the preliminary setting up of the yacht and the characters and ran out of space to do justice to the major story arch.

Still despite that, really enjoyed the story and look forward to reading more of the series.