As i said in an update this starts off like [b:Will Save the Galaxy for Food|30400208|Will Save the Galaxy for Food (Jacques McKeown, #1)|Yahtzee Croshaw|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1469403169l/30400208._SX50_.jpg|50923249], as they both feature awesome space captains who are forced to take a job running a rich persons private space yacht and have to deal with the owner and some annoying younger passengers etc.

However thats where the comparison ends... mostly due to this books (and its characters) obsession with 19th century fiction.
I mean if you thought ‘boy a sci-fi novel, I hope there’s lots of about horse-riding and foxhunting!’ , then first seek professional help.. a psychiatrist or horsetrainer either will do ;) and secondly this might be the book for you!

There’s so much upstairs/downstairs english classism here too, the whole first half feels like Downton Abbey in space (and not that much space either).

Suddenly the second half takes a wild left turn and turns into a sort of teen adventure tale. It does reference, although doesn't actually name the short story The Most Dangerous Game as an influence on these sections too.
However its still so heavily influenced by the 19th century that it feels like the [b:Coral Island|226800|The Coral Island|R.M. Ballantyne|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1343840889l/226800._SX50_.jpg|2167233] or some other very early adventure tale.
With the ‘main’ character, and i use that word lightly.. due to the amount of time she gets sidelined, becoming the focus again only for the denouement.

Its not.... terrible. The second half in particular is moderately compelling despite how little time we actually get with each character and the constant clash of timeperiods but i’d probably have given it 2 -stars if i wasn’t grading on a curve against some others things i’ve read recently like STEN. ( )

I am a big fan of fantasy and science fiction novels especially if they are long and have several books in the series. I really enjoy a series of books that I can immerse myself in and I first picked up an Elizabeth Moon novel because it was long and part of a multi-novel series. I continue to read her books because I find them engrossing and highly enjoyable. ( )

See book 7, Against the Odds

Moon, Elizabeth. Hunting Party. Serrano Legacy No. 1. Baen, 1993.
The Serrano Legacy is a seven-book series first published between 1993 and 2000. It is classic adventure space opera that strongly resembles the Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold. Bujold’s series feature several memorable women characters, but in Moon’s work strong women play the most important roles. In Hunting Party, we meet the series lead, Heris Serrano, a spaceship captain who resigns her commission under pressure and takes a job captaining a yacht for Lady Cecelia, a famous 80-year-old equestrian. Together, they engage in enough military and political action to power the series. The interstellar empire of this series seems vaguely Victorian, with several other kinds of governments on its borders. There are several subplots, but the title alludes to the 1924 short story, “The Most Dangerous Game.” A rogue general and his paying guests hunt convicts for sport. Moon, like Bujold, is an excellent storyteller, and her characters are lively enough that we happily revisit them in later novels. ( )

Heris Serrano has left the space navy in the trail of a scandal but luckily gotten a civilian job, to ship an old eccentric woman between planets. It means a ridiculous uniform, but it's a job. That is how the story starts, and what follows is an adventure including Serrano, the elderly employer and her nephew with friends.

This is an early book from Elizabeth Moon but a lot of ingredients are there. Military, powerful women, equality. Space. It's just not packaged as cleanly as in later books. There are sections of the book that are less interesting and there are some characters that are a little too hard to believe. Still, not a bad book, just not as good as the Paks novels or the Vatta novels. ( )