A Call to Duty (Book 1 of Manticore Ascendant)
by David Weber and Timothy Zahn (Baen, 2014)
A slow-cooking goulash of military procedure and political machinations, peppered with technical detail, bland in characterisation. The navy personnel are homogenous and one-dimensional, the protagonist a fully fledged square. In doling out lashings of Honorverse minutiae, Weber and Zahn fail to entertain.