I love this series of books. I had read the first four and because the last was available on tape I decided to just listen to this one. What a mistake. The narrator seriously sucked. She was unskilled in creating believable voices for each of the characters and her accent was distracting. While I am happy with the conclusion, I found getting there pain filled and distracting. I will not listen to anything that this woman narrates ever again.

Vatta's War, the series name, started slowly, with a narrator who did not vary voices much and with perhaps some unnecessary detail. This said, sticking through Book 1 got me hooked on the series. And Cynthia Holland grows on you. Her "gravely" voice is perfect for a space wardrama, I think. She got better at differentiating characters from themselves and from prose, too. Moon has a super ability to write about war and diplomacy, and she employs it to the hilt in this series. Moon's battle scenes are classic, superbly done, in my opinion. She creates engaging characters, too..people who stay with you for some time. It helps, of course, that her characters have the hero in them brought out by the action. All of this said, it would have been useful to know more about the origin of the "pirate" force. They did not seem to have a point other than greed and hatred. This said, seldom are things so black and white in real life. Book 5, Victory Conditions, brings the series to a climactic and successful conclusion...but there is room for a sequel a la Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth and Void Series and Moon's own Paksenarrion series. Space is a big place! Why did I rate the book a 5, when I rated the first one a 3? I use a "visceral involvement" indicator to make my judgments when I rate books. Victory Conditions was hard to put down. That's a 5 in my book.

I had the pleasure of listening to the rest of the series in either the Graphic Audio version (very good!) or the narrator from the original tape versions (I don't have her name). This narrator is just.. bad. No sense of the dramatic, bad voices. I think I'd rather be reading it in book form!

I think the biggest shame here is that when we get to the point where the good guys finally get the fleet they’ve been working for since the beginning, the reader gets so little pay off. The fleet is an amorphous entity that flutters about having little consequence to the events except that the drama plays out on a greater scale in the background of the protagonists’ emotional issues. Planning and tactics are extolled but never in much detail and in a story that fixates on building up to a titanic struggle, this conclusion ultimately lacks depth in a very disappointing way.
Regrettably, this shallowness is not compensated for by a correspondingly better treatment of the characters. Quality has not improved, merely quantity, in a narrative that spreads across a fleet, and three star systems and involves more than half a dozen character perspectives. The heroes, who often simultaneously are to have undergone dramatic changes while remaining fundamentally the same, are likable enough. The resolution of what felt like a tacked on romantic tension was not as appalling as it could have been, but still felt like a vexing element of the plot.

Elizabeth Moon's satisfactory conclusion to her Vatta's War series is marred by Cynthia Holloway's uninformed narration.

Come on! When you're reading a Sci Fi book, it's important--vital--to understand the words your are paid to pronounce and the context in which you say them. So, when "nanites" becomes "nan-i-tees," for example, well, it's a Sci Fi fan's nightmare.

Chalkboard, fingernails, flinch, flinch, flinch!

Her voice characterizations are quite good--I appreciate her craft. So, then, in this case, perhaps the real blame goes to the director and editor. Again, no excuses acceptable.

We SF fans are a picky bunch--it's the technical details--or at least the approximation of them--that matters. Without that, one might as well read historical fiction or something.

If you followed the Vatta's War series from the beginning you know what to expect. as the story wraps up nicely leaving just enough open to make you want a sequel. The narrator barely falters as she keeps up her inflection based character swap. The story is a little more fast paced as the story begins to come a close. as new characters are introduced some go through changes others are swept aside and more secrets are kept and revealed. a great listen.

This book had good surprises and a strong charter development with action, Sabatage and back stabing