Kerr and her team are now officially Wardens of the Department of Justice, but a new breed of Wardens. They are Strike Team Alpha, the first of a more aggressive team sent into the field only when it is clear that cooler minds and diplomatic approaches aren't going to work. Her team hasn't really changed much since An Ancient Peace: Book 1. Accompanying her on the Promise is its pilot, Craig Ryder; their sniper, Binti Mashina; a former criminal di'Tayka named Alamber, and the newly married Krai pair, Werst and Ressk.
What has changed though are the rules they must follow, because every dead body that comes out of their actions means a pile of paperwork, as the agency is managed by an overly-bureaucratic race called the Dornagin. It's not that they can't drop some bodies while in the field, but all other avenues should be explored and deaths should be avoided if at all possible. There are also a lot of other rules that come with being a Warden and not a branch of the military or an externally contracted group like they were in past books, but it seems most if it boils down to violence as a last resort, followed by paperwork.
In A Peace Divided, an archaeology team gets held hostage after the scientists sent out a report that noted a small amount of destroyed plastic. This gets the attention of a shadowy figure convinced that this long-dead civilization found a way to kill the plastic aliens that orchestrated the lengthy galactic war that only recently ended. Bent on finding the weapon, this figure sends a crew of mercenaries to the dig site in order to force the scientists to discover exactly what killed the plastic. Of course, the scientists themselves aren't all that convinced there is a weapon; they only found a small sample of the material in one place and it could have been an anomaly.
Naturally, this mission calls for Warden Kerr and her team, but when reports come in that the mercenary team consists of members of the Primacy and the Confederation, the task only gets more complicated as politics get involved and Kerr's team is also augmented by members of the Primacy as an effort to show the two sides can work together and that the war is truly in the past. To add more kinks in the works, the first ever Confederation-Primacy joint operation will be accompanied by Presit, a journalist that Kerr and her team have dealt with on many occasions.
Like An Ancient Peace before it, A Peace Divided has great pacing. The book starts off with a quick mission that helps to illustrate just how Kerr's team has to behave under the new rules, and before they have a chance to recoup too much from that effort, they are sent out again to face the mercenaries at the dig site. While there is story time made to prep for the mission and actually get to the mercenaries, it is time well spent that will not feel wasted for either the characters or the readers. It's not all action all the time, but the lulls between fights are far from boring, especially to anyone who has invested any kind of time in this universe. The Peacekeeper series continues to be a great addition to now-Warden Kerr's story and I can't wait to really sink my teeth into The Privilege of Peace: Book 3.
