Elizabeth Moon's Change of Command may be of interest to fans of her Familias Regnant military-family space saga, but it's a disappointing book when judged on its own merits.

The story revolves around the apparent assassination of "Bunny" Thornbuckle, the incongruously named head of state of the spacefaring Familias Regnant.

The government immediately falls into disarray, supposedly to demonstrate to the reader just how capable a leader Bunny was. Unfortunately, the political disaster that follows only begs the question of how such an unstable system worked at all.

Nothing rings truer in the book than a visitor's comment that "the government needs to overhaul its legal system in a big way."

It's a bad sign when the villainous Benignity of the Compassionate Hand seems both more sensible and more responsible than anyone in the theoretically heroic Familias.

Change of Command is the sixth installment in the ongoing Familias series, but is unlikely to be the last.

Like many middle books, it's short on both action and resolution. Most of the outstanding problems are neither resolved nor complicated into new forms over the book's 320 pages.

Moon accentuates this sense of inertia by short-circuiting the few scenes that might be expected to be tense in other hands or other contexts.

When forces hostile to the Familias take a group of schoolchildren hostage, Moon takes the easy narrative way out, allowing the authorities to quickly defuse the situation rather than fight it out. The would-be terrorists let the children go and their "getaway ship" promptly explodes.

Change of Command isn't terrible, and it's never gets so boring as to be hard to read. But once you put it down, there's not much incentive to pick it back up. This one's for hardcore Moon fans only.