An Ancient Peace – Tanya Huff

Now that the war is over, Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr and some of her old company, along with a few civilians, are working for the Justice Department. The book opens with them dealing with a humans first movement, but quickly pivots to them being hired for a much more important job.

Since the war is over, there’s been a movement to try and confine the Younger Races (human included), because they’re considered too violent. It seems that someone has found the H’san home world, where they buried all their weapons when they turned away from war, and if those weapons are found and sold, it would be the perfect excuse to take away the rights of the Younger Races.

This book ends up being a really interesting meditation on what happens at the end of war, and what that means to the various people in that war – those that fought, and those that were sheltered from the fighting. The book may certainly be on an intergalactic scale, but there are times you can’t help but think about what this means to us in the here and now, and what the experience of war has been like in the last several wars our country has been involved with.