Storm from the Shadows [Hardcover]

David Weber (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 3, 2009

Rear Admiral Michelle Henke was commanding one of the ships in a force led by Honor Harrington in an all-out space battle. The odds were against the Star Kingdom forces, and they had to run. But Michelle’s ship was crippled, and had to be destroyed to prevent superior Manticoran technology from falling into Havenite hands, and she and her surviving crew were taken prisoner. Much to her surprise, she was repatriated to Manticore, carrying a request for a summit conference between the leaders of the two sides which might end the war. But a condition of her return was that she gave her parole not to fight against the forces of the Republic of Haven until she had been officially exchanged for a Havenite prisoner of war, so she was given a command far away from the war’s battle lines. What she didn’t realize was that she would find herself on a collision course, not with a hostile government, but with the interstellar syndicate of criminals known as Manpower. And Manpower had its own plans for eliminating Manticore as a possible threat to its lucrative slave trade, deadly plans which remain hidden in the shadows.

 

Praise for the Prequel, The Shadow of Saganami:

“These hugely entertaining and clever adventures are the very epitome of space opera. . . . Weber . . . remind[s] the reader that a hero can be anyone who does his or her job with honor, commitment and skill.” —Publishers Weekly

 

“The Shadow of Saganami may be military science fiction great David Weber’s best tale in the Honorverse . . an action packed tale with a fully developed multiple cast. . . .” —The Midwest Book Review

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

This splendid continuation of the Honor Harrington saga takes its departure from both The Shadow of Saganami (2004) and At All Costs (2005). The Mantie commander on the spot (very much so, since she begins the novel as a Havenite POW) is Honor’s old subordinate, now an admiral, Michelle Henke. She is paroled to take home a proposal for peace talks between Manticore and Haven. In rapid succession, a Mantie officer attacks a planet protected by the Solarian League that is actually a base for the interstellar genetic-slavery oligarchy Manpower, Manticore annexes a cluster of systems and declares itself an empire, and the Solarian League gets trigger-happy. This all kicks everything up to the grand strategic level, where Honor is coping with new motherhood as well as her responsibilities as Empress Elizabeth’s most trusted advisor. Isn’t that enough for one heroine to have on her plate? Not if she is Honor Harrington, although more and more she has the loyal and competent assistance of a cast of scores, a listing of whom some, at least, may have welcomed. Weber prefatorily indicates changes in the long-term plans for the saga, which has achieved critical and popular success to a degree that is beginning to rival those of some fantasy and alternate-history competitors. However changed, and whatever may befall Honor, more enthralling reading awaits, apparently for ever more readers. --Roland Green

About the Author

David Weber is the science fiction phenomenon of the decade. His popular Honor Harrington novels are New York Times best sellers and can’t come out fast enough for his devoted readers. ADD SENTENCE ABOUT OFF A. REEF. He has also begun a top-selling epic SF adventure series in collaboration with John Ringo, with four novels so far: March Upcountry, March to the Sea,  March to the Stars and We Few. His Wind Rider’s Oath, another New York Times best seller, continues his popular Bahzell fantasy adventure series.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 768 pages
• Publisher: Baen; First Printing edition (March 3, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416591478
• ISBN-13: 978-1416591474
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (103 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #522,499 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David Mark Weber is an American science fiction and fantasy author. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1952. Weber and his wife Sharon live in Greenville, South Carolina with their three children and "a passel of dogs".

Previously the owner of a small advertising and public relations agency, Weber now writes science fiction full time.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Hardcover was too expensive to burn., July 21, 2009

By 

Aedhan Campbell (Tokyo, Japan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Storm from the Shadows (Hardcover)

**vague spoilers**

I have really enjoyed all of Weber's Honorverse books as well as some of his other titles, up until now. This book was awful. Unfortunately it would be difficult to give examples of why this book didn't work without giving out spoilers but I will do my best. He stated in the introduction that part of the book would be retelling events in other books from different character's perspectives... and it didn't really do that... but for the effort I found it hard to tell when in the overall story I was supposed to be. It just made the timeline for this book jumbled.

Next, there were too many attempts at subplots and character developments so that no one character or group of characters was focused on long enough for me to get interested in them. Nominally, I took it Michelle Henke was the "main character" but she only had two majour scenes. If you liked the characters from Shadow of Saganami, they're in there too... Aivers Terekhov is mentioned early, and forgotten, then mentioned again later... Honor makes an appearance or two... There's (I think) supposed to be development of Helen Zilwicki's and Abigail Hearn's characters, but Weber never really tells what happens with them, more like gives results in a summary later. (a bit of spoiler here) for example, someone has a problem with Abigail, they bad mouth her for a page or two and get talked to by someone else for a page, then no mention of it until later the Captain reports to the Commodore that "Abigail solved it by being Abigail and working really hard." (no, really, that was the solution.) Another point a competition is mentioned, then chapters later the results are stated in a paragraph... that sort of thing.

There's the main pseudo-antagonist in this but mostly, it's a repeat of what happened in Shadow of Saganami just less-so. There's no big battle.... four ships get blown up total, and none of them fought back...

The books was filled with references to one group's master plan... but they were all deliberately vague and not in any mysterious way... just a "oh, and this group is STILL planning something" way...

The passing touch on any character or group got very old very fast because, among other things, it was people reacting to things that had already happened and reacting incorrectly due to lag time in information due to travel requirements, worse the reader ALWAYS knew people were reacting incorrectly because it dealt with what happened and then with people not knowing about it. Further, one group had secretly developed a faster stardrive and so were always ahead of others, but no one figured it out despite constant references and ponderings about how [that group:] could NEVER have orchestrated all this because the time it would take to coordinate it was too long, or how that group always seemed to know things before others... frankly if every other page that held a reference to how that group couldn't have done something or known something due to travel time had been torn out and burned, there would still be too many incidents of it. Same with talking about other things that happend... an assassination attempt on someone (from another book) gets repeated ad nauseam, as do references to Helen's misadventures in Old Chicago.

By the end of the book, I just didn't care. Nothing really happened. Nothing really got done or was resolved. One group has a master plan. Another group is arrogant. Some people are angry and unreasonable. And most of the things that took place in this book already took place in other books. That about sums this book up. If you read Crown of Slaves, Shadow of Saganami and At All Costs, you'll have already covered about half this book. The other half are pointless hints that something else is going to happen. At some point. But not in this book.

I assume the half of this book that isn't already covered in the other three books will still be repeated in Mission of Honor and Torch of Freedom.

I never give up my books. I buy them and keep them so I can reread them. I have shelves in the attic filled with books, but frankly, if I thought I could get away with it, I'd return this book to the store tomorrow.

47 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good story with a huge cliff-hanger, February 25, 2009

By 

Mauricio Longo "Longo Review" (Rio de Janeiro, RJ Brazil) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Storm from the Shadows (Hardcover)

This book tells a generally good story. With this new wok, Weber moves up the Honorverse main storyline to a couple of months after the huge Battle of Manticore, narrated in his last major Honor Harrington novel - "At all costs".

If you follow the Honor Harrington story lines this book, per se, offers a view into what is happening in the Talbot Cluster while Haven and Manticore are at each others throats and opens up two new possible combat fronts for the embattled Royal Manticoran Navy.

Have in mind that the book ends with a huge cliff-hanger and that you will wish you had the next book in hand when you finish it.

32 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars And now, more internal dialog. Wait, another conference scene. Yawn., June 6, 2010

By 

Biggerbox (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Storm from the Shadows (Disciples of Honor) (Mass Market Paperback)

"As Admiral Michelle Henke availed herself of the spacious new head aboard her new flagship, she couldn't help but spend time lost in an internal dialog about how much improved the new Mark 23 dual-ply TP was than the old Mark 16 model, and marvel again at Admiral Hemphill's shop's cleverness in reducing the tendency of the sheets to fail to rip along the perforations, and the annoying lint they would sometimes leave behind, particularly in a battlecruiser under impeller power. Despite herself, she resisted the temptation to spend a few more paragraphs thinking about the technical improvements in toiletries since the first war with Haven, though it would have been just as boring as many of her other long meditations in the book so far. Still, she thought, she could have used that lint to provide her with something to think about now that her life seemed to consist of little more than chit-chat with other officers and officials, tediously described drills, and a neurotic compulsion to worry about how much she was eating (because she didn't have Honor Harrington's endlessly referred-to genetically enhanced metabolism.) The thought of Honor sent Mike into yet another reverie about those she had lost aboard her last ship, because it had been, it occurred to her, at least three pages since the last one was prompted for no apparent reason. But, snapping out of it, she realized she had urgent business to attend to on the bridge, involving the execution of another painstakingly described but essentially boring drill, surrounded by junior officers whose background she would go over in her head in long expository passages, though they served little to either make the characters three-dimensional or to advance any semblance of a plot. As she made her way across her dayroom, she noticed the page count had only reached 320, and, for a brief moment, feared she and her crew might not last for the remaining 400 or so pages the Admiralty had expected this "novel" to last, even when one accounted for the time-dilation effect of traveling through plot points already described (and entertainingly!) in the novels in which they actually took place, without actually adding much to them in this book. Thank goodness there would be many pages involving the evil conspiracy of the Mesans without revealing what their true intention might be, and many other characters who add their own interminable internal dialogs to the page count. Perhaps, she thought, it would be enough to keep the readers, or at least the Havenites, from realizing this book was badly in need of brutal trimming by an editor who remembered when David Weber knew how to build and move a plot along. The commercial fate of the Star Empire of Manticore, if not the entire Honorverse itself, might hang in the balance."