Peace is an illusion . After a decade, acclaimed Hugo Award winner and science fiction master John Scalzi returns to the Old Man's War series with the long-awaited seventh book, The Shattering Peace . For a decade, peace has reigned in interstellar space. An agreement between the Colonial Union, Earth and the alien Conclave has kept the forces of war at bay. But there is a new force that threatens the hard-maintained peace: The Consu. The most advanced intelligent species humans have ever met are on the cusp of a species-defining civil war, and the rest of the galaxy is at risk of being dragged into the conflict. Gretchen Trujillo is a mid-level diplomat, working in an unimportant part of the Colonial Union bureaucracy. But when she is called to take part in a secret mission involving representatives from every powerful faction in space, what she finds there has the chance to redefine the destinies of each - or destroy them forever .