Jacey Bedford's Journal

Marion “Mops” Adamopoulos and her alien/human crew of ship-board janitors and sanitation specialists are more used to cleaning up plumbing disasters, but when a freak occurrence killed all the crew but the janitorial team, it put them in charge of a space-ship, the EMCS Pufferfish (i.e. they stole it). Humans are very much second-class citizens after all humans on Earth turned feral following a terrible plague, but some (like Mops) have been ‘cured’ and allowed to take up menial positions in the Krakau space fleets, or have become cannon-fodder in the ongoing hostilities between the Ktakau and the Prodryans. Mops and her crew have to go to Earth to see if they can discover the source of the plague, and discover a team of librarians made up of plague resistant humans. Perhaps humanity isn’t quite dead yet. This is the middle book of a trilogy (I have the last one lined up already) and Mr Hines doesn’t ease you into it gently by backtracking on the story in the first book. You need to be up-to-speed with the characters. I wouldn’t recommend reading this one before the first (Terminal Alliance), but it’s well paced and has some startling revelation.