The Last Colony (Old Man's War #3) - John Scalzi

GoodReads Summary: Retired from his fighting days, John Perry is now village ombudsman for a human colony on distant Huckleberry. With his wife, former Special Forces warrior Jane Sagan, he farms several acres, adjudicates local disputes, and enjoys watching his adopted daughter grow up.

What would happen if genetic soldiers, after returning to their normal selves, had to fight a different fight?

John Perry and Jane Sagan, now being the parents of Zoë Boutin, have to manage and save a colony in a time when every other race in the universe decided to fight the human expansion.

In some ways, it felt like the boring parts of Children of the Mind, with annoying descriptions of a different planet, with its different fauna and flora and whatnot. I mean, for something more thoughtful, it gets boring pretty quick.

Also, there is this weird "let me show how John is smart, because he has almost 100 years" thingy. Every time the colony gets into trouble, John comes with a solution. It's not Jane, the intelligence soldier that solves this, 'cause she's only 10 or so years old. Actually, Jane logistics is rarely brought into play, so she mostly sits on the background like a deus ex machina due her past. And John never gets into a corner he can't escape.

Although these things are annoying, it doesn't bring the whole story to the ground: yup, the flora and fauna are boring, but they are a couple of pages; yup, Jane logistics is mostly through under the rug, but we have John; John never gets into a corner he can't escape or doesn't have a solution, either by intelligence or politics, but at least the story doesn't stall in those situations (well, because the situations don't exists, anyway).

As usual, a good, fast paced sci-fi book, like the others from Scalzi.