“A Peace Divided” eBook was published in 2017 and was written by Tanya Huff. Ms. Huff has published more than 30 novels. This is the second book in her “Peacekeeper” series.

I categorize this novel as ‘R’ because it contains scenes of Violence and Mature Language. The story is set on a remote world undergoing limited archaeological research. The primary character is former Confederation Marine Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr, who is now a warden for the Confederation Justice Department.

A group of archeologists have been taken hostage. Kerr and her team, augmented with a group from the Primacy, are sent to rescue the hostages. It has only been a few years since the long war between the Confederation and the Primacy ended. The joint operation by former enemies is full of tension.

When they arrive on-planet, they discover the group holding the hostages is also made up of both former Confederation and Primary military. They are there driving the archeologists to find a hidden weapon that can be used to destroy the race know as “The Plastic”. The Plastic was responsible for causing the long war between the Confederation and the Primacy. There are many who now want a way to take revenge on The Plastic for all the death and destruction.

Though I enjoyed the 12.5 hours I spent reading this 379 page Science Fiction novel, it seemed a little flawed. I liked the characters and the plot, but sometimes the story was a little confusing. While there being a prior novel in the series, which I hadn’t read, didn’t help, this novel stood pretty well on its own. I thought the cover art was well chosen. I give this novel a 3.9 (rounded up to a 4) out of 5.

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I’ve enjoyed Tanya Huff’s novels for years, particularly her fantasy, but her Confederacy, also known as the Valor series really got me hooked on Sci-Fi military novels. I’m really not into guns or other weapons; I respect and honor those who choose to serve in the military, but I could never really understand their devotion and enthusiasm for their service. Until I began reading about Torrin Kerr. The Valor novels begin with Valor’s Choice and Torrin and her platoon assigned to yet another dangerous mission on behalf of the Confederacy. The confederacy is made up of the Elder Races, those with the earliest and best technology who organized and invited other races to the Conferacy, and the Younger Races, who are recruited because they still retain the violent tendencies necessary to fight the Galactic War against the Primacy which has raged for centuries. All the Valor novels follow Terrin as she evolves in her role as a gunnery sergeant until she discovers a massive secret about the creation of the War that finally leads to peace with the Primacy. Just when it seems that there is no need for entities with her skill set, she is recruited by the Wardens, the peacekeeping hand of the Confederacy, to help enforce laws where the Elder Races even lack the ability to use understand violence.
A Peace Divided starts after Terrin’s first adventure as a Warden in A Separate Peace, where she and her team discovered that some military groups are searching for ancient weapons developed and then destroyed by one of the first Elder Races. A Separate Peace follows the plot started in that novel and continues.
Rather than describe the plot, I want to focus on some other elements of this novel, particularly the characterization. In this new series, Terrin is a military veteran who has had some horrific experiences during her career, leading to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Her charge as a Gunnery Sargent who lead some people to their death weighs on her, physically, as she feels the containers of ashes of the dead on her combat vest. She has finally agreed to see a counselor and come to the realization that the process has helped her and will continue to help her, and as a reader, it is possible to see that change when comparing her decision making in this novel to the decision making in the novels of the other series. More than almost anything, I enjoy watching characters grow and change through the experiences they have between the pages. Tanya Huff does an excellent job on this, not only with Terrin, but with the other members of her team.
In addition, the other members of her team are very creatively drawn. Huff has made the military units to include a mixture of alien races, by law, and emphasizes the equality among them. When she initially describes an alien race, she includes a little background about their evolution and history that allows the reader to understand that oddities that make them alien, whether they be body parts or eating choices, or mental perspective.
As military Sci-Fi, the novel has weapons and they are described in detail as well as designed scientifically to consider issues such as firing projectiles within a starship. Lastly the method of travel is described both scientifically as well as mathematically, again making it fit well within the Sci-Fi genre. Most important to me are the battles that make it military. Huff can go from a macro description to a more minute individual view all within a single paragraph and have it flow well. They strategy of the battles often reflect the attitudes of the specific race against which the team is fighting. To me, that’s great writing. The surprises that Huff often adds through Terrin are delightful.

Overall, it would be possible to read A Peace Divided on its own, because Huff provides just enough background on the big plot issues and the personalities, without being too repetitive or boring for a long-time reader like myself. However, why deprive yourself of the entire realm of the Confederacy. Starting with Valor’s Choice, you can only win.

There’s an absolutely kick-ass military SF story in A Peace Divided. And that story is a marvelous continuance of pretty much everything that has happened to Gunnery Sergeant, now Warden, Torin Kerr from her first introduction in Valor’s Choice to her re-emergence after the end of her war in An Ancient Peace.

So if you enjoy military SF featuring smart, kick-ass, hard-fighting female soldiers (in this case Kerr is an NCO in the Marines), start at the very beginning with Valor’s Choice. And take good notes, because it seems as if everyone she has ever crossed paths with, or even just run into, makes an appearance in A Peace Divided.

Along with her permanent enemies, and the original instigators of the Confederation’s war with the Primacy.

The future, as was once opined to a very young Dustin Hoffman as Ben Braddock in The Graduate, is in plastics. And that future is nowhere near as benign or profitable as his would-be mentor believed.

Unless, as it turns out, you’re running guns.

Like all of the books in this series so far, A Peace Divided is a part of the branch of SF that makes some interesting and peculiar uses of the concept that what you think is happening is not what is really happening. While that seems to have played a major part of the war between the Confederation and the Primacy, and everything that resulted from that war (as well as the uneasy peace that Kerr now finds herself in) it also applies to the action in this particular story, not just on the part of the plastic aliens, but here primarily on the part of the humans and other sentients who drive this story.

It seems that sentient behavior has a limited number of patterns to follow, whether the beings that follow those patterns are humans, Krai, or di’Tayken, or even whether those sentients are two-legged or four-legged, skinned or furred or carapaced, and every other variant that the writer managed to think of.

As one of the sub-themes of this story is about human (and admittedly other sentient) bigotry, it is ironic that part of the story rides on the concept that people are people, no matter what species those people are from.

There’s a lot going on in A Peace Divided. The story that we follow is that of a band of basically space pirates who have taken an entire archaeological team hostage in the possibly mistaken but certainly partly insane belief that the archaeologists have discovered a weapon that can kill the plastic aliens.

And the other part of the story we follow is, of course, that of Warden Torin Kerr and her, if not merry then certainly snarky band of mostly ex-military peace-keeping wardens, as they set out to rescue the archaeologists and take down the space pirates, hopefully with a minimum of bloodshed.

One of the ongoing issues of this series is that “minimum of bloodshed” is defined much, much differently in the police-like Wardens than it ever was in the Confederation Marines. Being a Marine was a whole lot easier. There were rules and there were orders, there was a strict hierarchy, and there was a lot of security in that, both for the Marines and for the ones giving the orders.

Kerr is now out on her own, in a hierarchy whose rules are occasionally very arcane, and where security is minimal. It’s all on her, not because she wants it to be, but because she can’t seem to find any other way to be.

But it is really, really hard to keep the peace when the other side is doing its level best, and its absolute worst, to start a war.

Escape Rating B+: I loved traveling with Torin Kerr and Company again, and I liked the story, but it really needs the dramatis personae listing in the front and with a lot more detail. Or a summary of the action up till now. I’ve read the whole series, absolutely loved the whole thing, but occasionally I got lost among all the names, races and faces.

Once things get down to the brass-tacks, it klicks along like a ship in warp drive, but it takes a while to get there. I expect that people who are binge-reading the whole series and have everything fresh in their minds are going to eat this one up with a spoon, because it feels like everybody who has ever touched Torin’s life gets at least a mention.

Underneath the story, there are at least three sub-themes going on, one more overt than the other two. And they all add depth to the action, as well as making the reader think about the book well after the last page.

The first, biggest and most obvious is the issue of the returning veterans. Like our own society, the Confederation has done an all too excellent job of training young people, for any and all definitions of people, to set aside their fears and their instincts and become effective and efficient killing machines. The problem they have, just like the one we have, is what to do with those killing machines after their war is over. And just like our own society, the Confederations equivalent of the VA is overworked and understaffed and some people slip through the cracks. Admittedly some also make a hole and dive out, but there are a lot of folks who need help and don’t get the help they need. And a lot of the people that Kerr finds herself dealing with are her former comrades who fell through those cracks and can’t find a way to adjust to being civilians. Kerr and her troupe have plenty of problems with re-adjustment themselves, and they all have each other.

The Marines have a code that they leave no soldier behind. As an NCO, Kerr carried the remains of too many of her soldiers out on her vest, and she’s still carrying them. That there are soldiers that the entire military seems to have left behind feels like failure. Only because it is.

And of course, those folks who are desperate and haven’t adjusted get used by others for their own nefarious ends.

The other two sub-theme layers are about gun control and bigotry. They are more subtle, and it is easy to let them go in the heat of the story, but they are definitely there. And they add color and texture to a story that could have just been gung-ho military SF, but ends up being so much more.

Warden Torin Kerr and her team are once again up to their eyeballs in trouble. What should have been a simple rescue mission turns very complicated. What did I like? It is always good to get to visit with Torin and crew. What did I not like? There was not that much of Craig. What did I have trouble with? All of the alien names. I had to do a lot of sounding out and then remembering who went with which group of aliens. This had a tie in with the plastics or how to kill plastics. It had a solution to the mission but there was a lot of question left unanswered. Seems that Torin and crew will be going on some interesting missions in the future.

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.

A terrific book. I had some moments of being lost, I think I would have enjoyed if I read book 1 in the series but I did enjoy it.

Full review to come closer to release

I am loving this series, and can't wait for the next one.

Full review to be published online in early June.

A PEACE DIVIDED is the second book of Tanya Huff's intriguing "Peacekeeper" series; which follows retired Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr and her loyal band after the end of the war started by the plastic aliens. The Wardens have bowed to the occasional necessity of force and formed strike teams composed of members of the Younger Races, mostly ex-military. Kerr and cohorts are Strike Team Alpha, and they have acquired a bit of a reputation.

After a scientific expedition excavating ruins on a restricted planet turns up evidence of destroyed plastic; a group of mercenaries arrives to find the weapon that they are sure must be there. The scientists, mostly mid-Races Katrien and Niln, are entirely unused to violence. Things do not go well. Strike Team Alpha are sent in to rescue the hostages, along with several members of the Primacy.

Readers following the series and already familiar with Huff's "Confederation" series will love A PEACE DIVIDED; but newbies to the world will find themselves utterly lost with the events and plethora of characters the reader is expected to already know. This is definitely not the place to enter this world.

Second in the Peacekeeper sequence, following retired Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr and her loyal band after the end of the war started by the plastic aliens. The Wardens have bowed to the occasional necessity of force and formed strike teams composed of members of the Younger Races, mostly ex-military. Kerr and cohorts are Strike Team Alpha, and they have acquired a bit of a reputation.

When a scientific expedition excavating ruins on a restricted planet turns up evidence of destroyed plastic, a group of mercenaries arrives to find the weapon that they are sure must be there. The scientists, mostly mid-Races Katrien and Niln, are entirely unused to violence. Things do not go well. Strike Team Alpha are sent in to rescue the hostages, along with several members of the Primacy (formerly known as the Enemy). Events develop from there.

This is absorbing, but a bit more diffuse than the first one. There are a lot of characters to keep track of.

Well worth reading.

3.5 stars

Torin has to be a unique mix of peacekeeper, Marine and politician, in a universe where nothing is *quite* as it is for us. Guns can't be concealed, plastic is either inert or a manipulative intelligent lifeform, and whatever she does there's a mountain of paperwork. Luckily (or not) there's a species that thrives on beauracracy...

And then there is the task at hand. With the opposing teams almost equally balanced, strategy and experience may decide whose long odds are most successful, but it might be too close for comfort.


This wasn't quite as enjoyable as the first, but still good. I would have found it less confusing if I'd reread #1, because then I would have been able to keep the various species' straight. It took me too long to get back into this universe, but that's a failing on my part! Will definitely improve on rereads. (Especially as "watching" alien archeologists at work was quite entertaining.)