Diplomatic immunity

Miles and Ekaterin are getting back from their honeymoon when they are sent off to quaddiespace to investigate some Barrayarans who have gotten into some trouble. Needless to say this small investigation immediately escalates into attempted murders and politics (always) and threats of all out war. This book manages to tie in a bunch of bits from other books: there's the quaddies from Falling Free, Nicol from Labyrinth, Bel Thorne from a bunch of previous books, but also the Star Creche from Cetaganda. I think there's enough background explanation here (sometimes too much) that you could read this book without having read any of the others.

One thing I do really love about this book is that we get to see how terrible Barrayarans are. We get this perspective a little bit from Cordelia's point of view in Shards of Honor when Betans are horrified by backwards militaristic Barrayarans. And we certainly hear some later on a little, largely about Barrayarans fear of genetic mutation. But here, we really get to see Barrayarans as enthusiastic frat boys with weapons. "Oh, some of our people got arrested unfairly, well maybe we should take our plasma weapons down and try to break them out from the local jail."

As this book takes place in quaddiespace and involves a number of quaddies, I really appreciate the parallels that it makes to Falling Free. Part of it is disaffected Guppie, who also lost his livelihood by becoming biologically obsolete on Jackson's Whole. But, I do also love the last paragraph of the book saying "it felt like free falling into the future" as a deliberate echo of Falling Free's title and similar thematic lines.

Only a few books in this series are not from Miles' point of view. Maybe this was an editing decision, but while Miles is out of the action (but after he'd largely set the solutions to everything in motion) we find out that Ekaterin put those plans into action and ordered people around with authority she didn't know she had. This feels to me like it could have been some great scenes and some on page character growth for Ekaterin, but instead we just get told about it.