This is really more of 3.5-star book, but the old-style chapter titles pushed the rating up for me. For example:
Chapter 1: "WHEREIN the Woods, Noting Our Hero's Sudden Departure, Resolve to Give Chase"
Chapter 2: "WHEREIN Our Hero, Noting the Woods' Triumphant Return, Desperately Casts About for an Axe"
Chapter 3: "WHEREIN Our Hero, Axe in Hand, Discovers the Forest Brought Guns. Many, Many Guns."
And,
Chapter 27: "WHEREIN Our Hero, Having Returned to the Woods, Pretends He is a Tree"
It’s a pretty solid space adventure romp with heist. The space fight action scenes could have been done a bit better but the book is definitely trying for the space opera label rather than hard SF, so I’m willing to give that a pass. It’s a self-published novel that I picked up in a bundle a couple years ago, but it’s fairly well edited and since my copy is a couple years old, the handful of typos I noticed may have been fixed since then. The only other editing thing I might criticize is the flow in a couple of places, but overall I’d say it’s well done and shouldn’t be dismissed on that account.
What really carries the novel, though, is Captain Grif Vindh of the Fool’s Errand and his spacer crew. They’re not particularly deep, but they’re fun. It’s a nice bit of space fluff (although not particularly fluffy) where the titular “Bug”, Ktk (alien space centipede), keeps betting another crewmember, Cyrus, against the Captain as they have their adventures.
And as Ktk puts it:
Every time it had lost a bet it had also survived, and that it really considered the process less of a gamble, and more of a tax to ensure its survival.