After languishing in a brutal enemy prison for twenty years, Captain Faulkner is finally freed but he immediately finds himself the target of assassination attempts and political conspiracies. Instead of a quiet retirement where his broken mind and body might have a chance to recover, he finds himself back where he was during the war twenty years ago, commanding the Confederate battleship Mantis. Like its Captain, the Mantis is being rebuilt and forcibly brought into the modern era with unpredictable results, which wouldn't matter much if a series of puzzling events wasn't reigniting the flames of war again. After a generation of peace, and officers who rose through political connections rather than merit, the last hope of the Confederation might be a broken man, an antiquated patched up warship, and its crew of random misfits.

It's always fun to root for the underdog even though it's a fairly common plot in this genre. This first book shows a lot of promise, but there is also definite room for improvement. Several of the characters have complicated histories with Faulkner being the most prominent. However, I thought Faulkner's character wasn't actually fully developed. His physical and mental issues seem remarkably shallow for someone who was tortured for twenty years. We also learn almost nothing about him beyond how he ended up in the prison, not even what he did that caused him to be accused of "war crimes". There are a couple of attempts on Faulkner's life, a missing battle fleet, and a research base that gets destroyed. Perhaps the most realistic aspect of the story is that suspicions keep shifting from their traditional enemy to a government conspiracy faking things to reignite the war and back again. While we eventually discover what the big threat is, and it's not only interesting but involves some good combat, there are still a lot of loose plot threads scattered around and I didn't get the impression that further books would be resolving them, but I might be surprised.

Eve of War is available in e-book through Amazon and included in Kindle Unlimited. It is also available on Audible using Virtual Voice for the narration and reviewers were not impressed, they only rated the performance at 2.5 stars.