The Human Division by John Scalzi

Part of the “Old Man’s War” series.
The book continues the story from the Lost Colony. The Earth now knows that the Colonial Union has kept them in the dark about what is really going on the galaxy. The relations are strained, but there are diplomatic talks starting with Earth and CU. There are also some fledgling discussions between CU and the Conclave, a union of dozens, if not hundreds of alien races. And the Conclave is tempting Earth to join them and to abandon CU completely. But it starts to seem that some party doesn’t want that those discussions will come to something and is ready for extreme actions to sow distrust.
This book was originally published as a series of stories which could be bought separately as e-books. As the Amazon was charging horrible surcharge for non-US readers I had to wait for the real book publication. Was it worth of the wait? Well - yes and no.
The original format causes some problems. Especially in the beginning the chapters felt very separate and it was hard to find coherent plot line running through. As the book progressed that problem mostly went away as a fairly coherent plot emerged and it turned to something lot less fractured, even the writing felt better by the end of the book. However, the story doesn’t end here, it practically just begins…
432 pp.