Freedom’s Ransom, By Anne McCaffrey

The Eosi are dead, and Botany, Earth, and all other human colonized planets are free to do what they will. But there is one hitch: the merchants of Barevi refuse to bring back all the stolen goods to Earth. All these items are vital to get Earth back up and running, but the Barevian merchants are notoriously tightfisted. So the colonists of Botany take it upon themselves to ransom back Earth’s property using judicious amounts of their own property. Zainal, Kris, and a few others set out to Barevi with gold, copper, coffee, and a dentist. But more problems will arise than they expect: most notably, the peacekeeper of the Barevian marketplace is an old enemy of Zainal’s, possibly even the Catteni who allowed him to be shipped to Botany. He will stop at nothing to discredit, bankrupt, and humiliate Zainal and the ones closest to him.

Have we switched genres again when I wasn’t looking? Because I could swear we started out as an adventure novel. Then we switched to Space epic. And now we’ve switched again to, I believe, well, I don’t really know what to call it. An epilogue, really. Most stories like to end when the supreme evil man/people are defeated and the universe is all wonderful again. For some reason we have been brought back for an encore. Don’t get me wrong, this is a good book, but I just wish McCaffrey could make up her mind. It’s a great storyline, but it has no real bearing on anything. It’s not that exciting. You can’t make a thriller out of a shopping trip, it just doesn’t work. Maybe if there was another story mixed up with it: then it would work. We’ve been to Barevi to buy things before, and that was okay. It was interesting, brief, and just dandy. I don’t think it was a good idea to write a whole book about it, though.

We do get to see Earth, in its declined and impoverished state. That’s fun, especially driving around, getting coffee, and seeing Africa. But it’s just not enough. Freedom’s Ransom is really a corollary novel; just an epilogue. As much as it’s not bad to read and handles itself well…that doesn’t make up for the lack of excitement and energy that was part of the series before. I really don’t know what McCaffrey was thinking.