“A Peace Divided” follows on directly from “An Ancient Peace”, making it the seventh Torin Kerr book. If you haven’t read the others, don’t start here. Give yourself a treat and read “Valor’s Choice” and come back here when you’ve caught up

Torin Kerr isn’t a Gunnery Sergeant in the Confederation Marines, fighting a war against the Primacy any more. The war is over. Primacy are no longer the enemy, if they ever really were.

Now Torin’s life is much more complicated. She leads a Peace Keeper Strike Force, dealing with violent people churning through civilian space in the wake of an unexpected peace. Torin’s not a soldier anymore. Winning now involved more than getting in, killing the enemy and getting her people home. Now she has to uphold the law and make sure as few people as possible, on either side, die while she’s doing it.

“A Peace Divided” is full of action. Itopens with a firefight between Torrin’s Peace Keeper Strike Team and a heavily-armed gun-runners and swiftly moves on to a mission to rescue Federation scientists being held hostage by mercenaries. Both situations illustrate the shift in the context of Torin’s violence from fighting a war to keeping the peace.

The book moves beyond the action to reflect on its causes as Torrin asks herself why the Strike Force is necessary and what should really be done about the veteran soldiers, damaged in the war and displaced in the peace, who spread violence and whether she and her people are being manipulated.

Torin is still the heart of this book and it was good to spend more time in her company but I liked the fact that we saw large parts of the story from the point of view of other, usually alien, characters. We shared the experience of a young human mercenary, caught up in violence he doesn’t approve of but can’t walk away from, an elder race scientist who struggles even to imagine violence, until her colleagues fall victim to it and she has to decide whether to fight or die and a pair of Cray coming to terms with marriage and the vulnerability it brings.

I admired Tanya Huff’s skill in presenting the large number of alien species in this book, without confusing me or diluting the identities of the species. I liked her ability to show the species as very different from one another and yet showing that they are still more likely to be bound together by their occupational roles (scientist, soldier) than by their genetics.

The “Humans First” organization (who have now lost the annoying apostrophe) are used not just to demonstrate the power of bigotry and hate but to show that the issues that feed that hatred are real and tosuggest that the people who fund the hate have a darker, more personal agenda.

What made “A Peace Divided” compelling was that it kept fusing simple explanations.. The complexity isn’t added just to enrich the puzzle, it’s there because life is like that.

The appeal of Torin’s mantra of getting her people home safe is that it gives her the certainty needed to act decisiviely but she is aware that it filters out the bigger picture. Now she’s having to confront that there is no officer to frame the bigger picture for her and recognises that she will have to form that picture for herself and her people. ( )

Nothing brings two sides together like a common goal. Former Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr is now enjoying life working with her partners and former soldiers as Wardens for the Justice Dept. A scientific mission has been taken hostage over the possibility there may have found something about the plastic aliens. The mercenaries are a mixed group of Confederation and Primacy members. With a delicate peace hanging in the balance Torin finds herself working with Primacy soldiers but the good news is that she has worked with them before.
The book is great and builds on what has happened in the previous books. I really enjoy this series and I can’t wait to see the next book come out in the series.


Digital review copy provided by the publisher through Netgalley
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Way too many characters to keep track of. I had no idea who was who in the passages that took place on the planet. A frustrating read. ( )

I was having a bad day and saw that the next Peacekeeper book was available - one click buy of the e-book later and I was happily ensconced back in Torin and Craig's world. I have to decide if I want to get the hardcover for my bookshelf as well, I've got all the others. It starts off with Ressk and Werst having a bonding ceremony and that triggered me to go back and re-read previous books to find the hints Huff had dropped. :-) This one has the Wardens rescuing a group of scientists held hostage by a group of mercenaries of mixed Confederation and Primacy backgrounds. The planet is a jungle and I was with Binti and her disgust of the snakes. I liked that they got reunited with some of the Primacy characters from other books. ( )

I kept having to refer to the character sheets in back to know what individual of what species and affiliation was talking. Good story but a confusing wealth of species, sides and characters. ( )