Cetaganda by Lois McMaster Bujold
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
What Barrayar was thinking, sending Miles and Ivan to represent them at the funeral of the Empress of a long-standing but currently quiet empire, I will never know. If you had an uneasy truce with a planet with which you’d been at war for years and years, would you send, to a formal event, the two people who can’t seem to go anywhere without getting into the kind of trouble that quickly escalates to global proportions?
But, no conflict, no story; so off these two instigators go… and soon there is drama and excitement and mystery (and nobody was surprised). Insert chapter after chapter of Miles and Ivan getting deeper into trouble that they barely manage to get out of before starting all over again; political intrigue; things not being quite what they seem; and ultimately the chance to save an empire (albeit not the empire Miles grew up wanting to become the savior of).