Bound by Honor: I had some issues with this one.

Bound by Honor (Vigilante, #4) by Glynn Stewart & Terry Mixon
My rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ out of 5 stars

An enemy of newfound strength
A friend gone missing in the night
A threat that can be ignored no more

Brad Madrid, Commodore of the Vikings Mercenary Company, has once again been drawn into the war against the resurgent Cadre. Called into action in battles across the Solar System, from the fogs of Venus to the ice fields of Ceres, he faces deadly enemies at every turn.

In the midst of the chaos, Brad learns that his Agency contact and partner, Kate Falcone, has gone missing before she could deliver the evidence of treason she carried. With millions of lives at stake, finding her cannot be his first priority, but he searches as he goes.

Then an old enemy shares a poisonous gift as they flee from battle: the Cadre doesn’t have Kate Falcone. They know who does, however, and the hints they give Brad lead him to the one place he thought he would never make war…

Maybe I should start off by saying that my issues with this book is very much from personal taste than from any bad writing on the author’s part.

The first three books in this series, Heart of Vengeance, Oath of Vengeance and Bound by Law was great. They all got 5 out of 5 from me. They are great adventures. Pirates, revenge and action. The hero is great and the rest of the characters are just as good.

I quite like that this is something as unusual as a science fiction universe were everything takes place inside of the solar system. That’s right, no FTL! And still there are plenty of ship action as well as man to man combat on ships, space stations and various asteroids and moons in the solar system. The physics and science is believable, the fleet (small fleets but still fleets) action is great.

In short, this series ticked almost all the right boxes for me. However I could only bring myself to give this book 3 out of 5 stars. Some may say that it is an unfair rating and they are probably not entirely wrong. Still, I am not a professional reviewer and this is my personal take on and personal rating of this book.

The writing, the characters and pretty much everything I mentioned before is still there. But, the pirate adventure and revenge aspect is pretty much lost and instead been replaced by solar system wide politics, conspiracies, betrayal and so on and so forth. That stuff is really quite far from my cup of tea no matter how good the writing is.

Then we have the ending. Obviously I’m not going to spoil anything here but, again to me personally, it was a really really shitty ending. I was quite frankly pissed off by it.

So there you have it. Those not too concerned with my gripes above will probably find this book as good as the rest of them. Overall I do like the works of both of the authors so I will undoubtedly pick up the next one that comes out regardless of my issues with this one.