Nemesis Games

Pros: splitting the characters up into their own interweaving arcs is good to learn a lot more about them; finally seeing all the different characters on the board at once is fun and feels like an appropriate payoff for the size of series and how far we are into it; still more smart than most fun books and more fun than most smart books (I.e. the politics have a lot of reasonable depth in them and the scenarios feel quite realistic in how people and people groups react to things); Naomi's backstory in particular adds a lot of depth to her since she didn't really have any apparent flaws

Cons: a whole book without the most interesting part of the series (what do we do when we face an alien thing and have no clue what it is or how to interact with it safely?); we're jussssst starting to stretch the credulity of “wait, is every main character linked somehow to every important person in the galaxy?”