David Weber is probably best known for his "Honor Harrington" novels, a military SF series. Path of the Fury is also military SF with a tough female protagonist, but set in its own universe with no connection to Harrington's.

Weber's title for this novel was well chosen: it suggests Travel and Fury. That covers the major features of the plot. Talk about truth in advertising!

We start out with a good strong concept for a scene: A gang of pirates came down in their "assault shuttle" to a small settlement on a frontier colony world and slaughtered everybody in sight (right before the scene actually started). Now they are grabbing everything valuable to load onto the shuttle and go back up to their mother ship in orbit and disappear into the wild blue yonder before any Imperial Navy forces happen to come along.

But they made one tiny little mistake: When they killed every human being in the village with automatic weapons fire (and some energy weapons), they didn't know that one young woman was out hunting that day and thus only heard the slaughter from a distance, then made it back to the settlement after the pirates had assumed there was nothing more to worry about.

They also didn't know that until she retired five years ago, she was a highly decorated Captain in the Imperial Cadre, colloquially known as the "drop commandos." The Cadre are a very, very tough and elite group who do whatever the Emperor tells them to do, with a separate command structure from the huge but more orthodox Imperial Fleet and Imperial Marines. From Weber's descriptions of how other people fear and respect the Cadre, we gather that they are so ferociously competent and single-minded when it is time to start killing people at close quarters that no one in his right mind would ever want to be their designated target no matter how many soldiers of his own he had on hand. The general impression is that the drop commandos make modern "special warfare" outfits such as the U.S. Navy SEALs or the British Special Air Service look like sissies.

This is understandable because - to the best of my knowledge - even the very best commandos of our real world are not cybernetically enhanced to make them even nastier customers than they already were after grueling training. But Alicia DeVries has been. Very quick thinking, ability to completely tune out pain by blocking the nerve sensations around a wounded area, ability to deliberately pump an extra dose of adrenalin (or endorphins, or other useful chemicals) into her bloodstream as she goes along . . . you get the idea. She has no body armor handy and thus she's not bulletproof, but all of the above means that if your bullet hits her without instantly killing her, then you haven't really accomplished much in the short run, i.e. she can still concentrate on returning fire with lethal accuracy and worry about her own injuries later - though they could still kill her.

When she stealthily approaches home and sees the bodies of her nearest and dearest (grandfather, mother, kid brother, and other members of the extended family) strewn about, she activates her built-in battle computer and starts killing pirates. Heck, there are only two dozen of them! (Not that she was in any mood to wait for a better opportunity later, even if there had been a hundred times as many.)

The battle might be called a draw. Mutual Assured Destruction? Two dozen freshly dead pirates, and Alicia DeVries has taken five hits. One shattered a femur, two punctured the liver, one punctured the left lung, and one hit the spleen and small intestine (we learn these details later from a surgical report). She's thirty kilometers from the next settlement and lying in the snow in winter conditions, and her chances of survival seem nonexistent. Which pains her, because it's a cinch that the pirates she killed were only one group in a much larger operation, and she'd love to make a clean sweep before she died. She reflects that she would do anything for another chance at vengeance, and a disembodied psychic voice suddenly says, Anything, Little One? She agrees that she's willing to pay whatever price it takes, and the next thing we know . . .

It's a week later. Military units have arrived on the planet and started going over every site the pirates attacked, looking for clues, survivors, dead pirates to try to identify, etc. They found the bleeding-but-barely-alive body of Alicia DeVries and rushed her to the only hospital on the planet. The odd thing is that the doctors swear that when they started working on her, she looked as if she had just suffered those injuries within the last hour or two, and reconnaissance overflights during the week since the attack never picked up the thermal image of a still-living human body lying out in the open at that site, which is why it took a week for anyone to come around looking for forensic evidence. At which point she suddenly seems to have appeared in the snow, once someone was on the ground and could hastily pick her up and run back to his shuttle with her and move at supersonic speeds toward the hospital. As if she had moved forward in time, or spent the intervening week in a place where time does not pass at the normal rate, or something of the sort.

Once she wakes up she discovers she has a passenger inside her skull: the disembodied (except in the sense that it is now linked to Alicia's body) personality of Tisiphone, who claims to be one of the three Furies of ancient Greek mythology. Tisiphone has superhuman psychic abilities and is willing to help Alicia use them to hunt down the pirate outfit that slaughtered her family. Alicia initially mentions the existence of Tisiphone to the military medical staff, which gets them very upset, but of course they think she's delusional. Alicia/Tisiphone finally break out of what we might call protective custody and steal a spaceship. Not just any old spaceship, but a brand new Artificial Intelligence-containing "alpha synth" courier ship which is a new design that bonds psychologically with the assigned pilot. Alicia names it Megaera, and now we have three personalities all linked together, just like the three Furies. (The third Fury in Greek myths was Alecto. Isn't it marvelous how, by sheer coincidence, the name Alicia somewhat resembles that one?)

The problem is that the rest of the book is very predictable, even if you haven't already read several of Weber's other works to get a feel for how he normally plots things. A death warrant is put out on the schizophrenic and enraged renegade drop commando Alicia DeVries . . . she manages to use her/Tisiphone's/Megaera's exceptional psychic/hacking abilities to gain information and pull off deceptions that no one else would be able to do single-handed . . . she finally gets a lead on someone who's marketing some of the pirate's merchandise . . . there's lots of talk about high-level political scheming and the implication that the pirates are sponsored by someone very high up in the Imperial hierarchy, which certainly helps them continue to only raid planets that don't have Imperial Fleet units anywhere nearby at the time of the attack . . . Alicia's own psychological stability is slowly eroding given her total obsession with vengeance . . . finally the clever ambush that wipes out the pirate fleet . . . there's still an evil mastermind to be dealt with . . . finally all is forgiven . . .

In fact, when I started writing this review I thought I was only going to give this book three stars: Average, despite a good strong start, since one gripping scene does not a masterpiece make. But in fairness I had to pick it up and reread portions of it to refresh my memory, and I finally decided that it rated four. Barely. A problem I frequently have with David Weber is that his actual writing style doesn't grab hold of me. It doesn't actually put me to sleep, but it just doesn't sing to me either. And sometimes the technical jargon can get pretty thick (if you've read much Tom Clancy, you can expect similar things from Weber, only dealing with technology that doesn't actually exist yet). But the plot was interesting and there are some good lines, here and there. Enough to make it a bit more interesting than the run-of-the-mill adventure novel detailing someone's quest for revenge, but I only recommend it as being a better-than-average specimen of that particular story type. If you wanted something else, such as brilliantly detailed speculation on future social patterns, look elsewhere!

One thing I'll mention, since this is an attractive young female protagonist and you might leap to mistaken conclusions on that basis: No romance. None. Alicia apparently has never yet married or had kids (if she ever in her life even had a serious boyfriend she might have considered marrying someday, I don't recall a single reference to the fact), and she makes no progress in that direction in this book. (Understandably, since she's totally obsessed with bloody revenge throughout most of the story.) Not even a kiss, nor any hint at the end of the book that she is preparing to develop any real social life in even the most chaste and harmless sense, beyond the necessary functions of holding down a job and so forth. I explain this to you so you won't assume that a SF novel featuring a gorgeous super-capable young woman must involve the eventual encounter with an equally capable and impressive man who gradually becomes an essential part of her life, et cetera. I don't claim that a hint of romance is automatically essential to a novel, but it does liven it up a little and as it stands, all we really have in Alicia's psychological development is two things: First, she finally gets the hang of adapting to the intrusion of Tisiphone the Fury and Megarea the AI into her mind; Second, she finally calms down after achieving revenge against her enemies. Isn't that exciting and surprising? (No, not really.)

Recommended: Yes