Thieves: A Diving Novel (Diving Universe #9) by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

This is the next book in the Diving Universe series. This book changes scenes a bit and follows the Boss, who founded the “Lost Souls” corporation that seeks spaceships abandoned by the Fleet”, a vaguely Starfleet-like space-bound organization that always travels forward. The fleet has left ships in ”Graveyards” that contain hundreds, if not thousands, of spaceships in varying conditions. While the Boss is examining the graveyard, she finds an area that seems to be concealed very well -- for the fleet technology also, not only for other sorts of tech. Meanwhile, the Fleet gets a transmission from a distant Graveyard. Someone seems to be stealing ships from it. The Fleet has little information about it because it is so remote, and long ago it abandoned the area, but they start to suspect that the Graveyard has been used to stockpile rarely used, but very powerful, Fleet warships, which are kept secret even for most of the Fleet members. They decide to send a scouting party to examine who is the thief.

Meanwhile, the Boss is eventually able to find out that the cloaked area seems to contain a vast number of strange-looking ships which are apparently in pristine condition. And that is about all the plot there is in the 500 pages of a book that ends in a cliffhanger. The pace seems glacial; nothing much seems to happen except endless discussions of trivial things. The worst example is when the Fleet captains have probably a ten-page discussion on how they should tether their ships while they are traveling through the “foldspace” (which enables FTL travel with poorly understood anacapa engines). Why should I care? Does this have any significance for the plot? (No, it doesn’t.) The childcare problems of the Fleet officers feels a bit superfluous as well. The Boss also spends a lot of time ruminating on old things and past missions. And exactly the same figure of speech is used to represent how tense she is. It's used twice (If I were on a dive, they would pull me out because my heart is beating so fast…). By far, this is the worst part of the series so far. It's so slow that if I wouldn’t have already bought the next part partly by mistake, I might reconsider whether or not I should continue with the series.  

490 pp.