I've been a big fan of Martin Limon's Sergeants Sueño and Bascom novels ever since I happened across a copy of JADE LADY BURNING back in the mid-nineties. Some of the subsequent entries in the series have been extraordinary, some have been pretty good, and a few have been... well, let's just call them forgettable.

WAR WOMEN is somewhere in the middle of the pack. It's highlighted by Limon's usual fine writing style and the vivid sense of place he brings to his books, but its dragged down by two very slight separate narrative lines that only intersect tangentially at the very end. The narratives themselves are so weak that the novel ends with half a dozen pages of people standing around telling each other what happened just like they do in every mediocre television series.

Five stars for fine writing, and three stars for a lame narrative comes out, I guess, to four stars if you're feeling generous. And some of the fine books I've read from Limon before do make me feel very generous indeed.