Honor's Knight is the second book in the Paradox series by Rachel Bach; the first was Fortune's Pawn (link goes to my review).
Honor's Knight continues the adventures of mercenary extraordinaire Deviana Morris. It has its good points and it has a few problems. It's at its best when it is a straight up adventure SF novel. Bach is good at writing battle scenes and spices it up with an occasional romantic scene and that's fun. But there are two sorts of problems. The first is that, in this book much more than the first, Bach adds moral issues. They don't fit well with the rest of the book and they are not Bach's strength. The second is that there is too much "hand waving" - that is, things we have to believe without any reason and that seem contrary to the way the universe works
(Minor spoilers follow).
The first two are common to many SF novels: We have to believe that faster than light travel is possible and we have to believe that we will meet aliens who are close enough to us that we can have wars that are not utterly one sided. Fine. I'll give her those. You can't really have this sort of book without those assumptions.
But then we are asked to believe that there is something called Plasmex that is part of all living things, including us and aliens from different planets. This seems fundamentally wrong. Then we are asked to believe that there are entities that have almost no physical reality but that can easily destroy planets. Then we are asked to believe that one way of stopping them involves the torture of children. And, finally, that our hero has some capacity to stop these entities.
If you can ignore all these hand waves and just enjoy the fighting, it's a good book. But it's a lot to ignore.
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