Forty years later, a surgeon returns to the planet where she served in a war and spent time as a POW. It’s supposed to be a vacation, but she and her family get wrapped up in a local political mess and her grandson is kidnapped. I had heard the author talk about this before it came out, especially about how she wanted the protagonist to be old and fragile since it’s not common in fiction. I enjoyed it a lot. The worldbuliding felt real without taking up too much space, important because it’s a novella. It required some suspension of disbelief for an old woman with a bad hip fighting as well as she did, but that wasn’t too much of a distraction.
As an aside, Kowal often stops at Murder by the Book in Houston, TX on her book tours and they will ship signed copies from the event without an upcharge. I got this book (which is bound with Red Star Hustle), signed, for the same price as I would have ordering it unsigned from bookshop.org.