Out of the Dark is . . . interesting. It's got a whopper of a twist ending that I'd maybe, possibly be on board for if this was the first book in a new series . . . or if the "twist" elements were introduced earlier. (Weber drops some hints--the title, as it happens, is a pretty big one--but the nature of "twist" doesn't become clear until the last pages of the book.)

It also suffers from a few too many viewpoints: the story follows four human protagonists (all male . . . little annoying from the guy who created Honor frickin' Harrington) as well as the alien commander of the invasion force. This split attention span results in some unusually wooden dialogue and undeveloped secondary characters--again, not something completely unusual in the annals of science fiction, but a little surprising from Weber.

All in all, I've got my fingers crossed that Weber writes a sequel, set either on post-invasion Earth or on the way to delivering the royal a$$-kicking the Hegemony deserves for picking on humans. This particular set of ideas has possibilities, and I'd be eager to see Weber set some of the inadequacies of Out of the Dark right with another book.