My review is also posted on Amazon...
I want to start by saying, I love this story! Breeze is a character that every single person on the planet can identify with, at some level. All the characters are people (Human or Tal'mar) have something essential to the nature of a good story. Jamie Sedgwick is a very talented writer!
Here is where I have a slight issue with the tale...
Breeze, in many ways, reminds me of the characters in Star Trek Voyager. They each seem to face a level of diversity that pushes them to a limit they thought previously insurmountable, but (and this is where things get hinky), they only face that challenge for a short period of time, then overcome it, then move on.
I always love a character who I can get really into, but sometimes, the ones in Tinker's War seem like that can reach out and put hands on that one item, or one solution that will solve the problem at hand without having to earn it.
I love adversity in what I read! I love to see the characters face struggle, strife and tension, but to have them come out on the other side so quickly against gigantic odds and nearly impossible situations... it seems a little to 'deus ex machina' to me.
Case in point, the death of Robie... or the fact that Robie was chosen with such surety and decisiveness after being in what looked to me like it could have been an epic battle of male ego for the hand of a woman they loved...It just seems a little too unrealistic.
The fact that Robie's death was such a short lived and underplayed tragedy extenuates my point. To move on so quickly seems, to me at least, to be more of a Vulcan characteristic in comparison to the passion Breeze felt over Tinker or over her friend and her swat team.
I will read the rest of the series with eager anticipation of the storyline leveling out a bit without such huge leaps of success against what sounded like a very challenge opponent in the Vangar. In order for me personally to believe in a story and in the characters, I need to be able to visualize their actions as being choices I would make and consequences I could understand, if not accept.