More quick catch-ups:
Elizabeth Moon’s Heris Serrano is an omnibus of the first three books in her Familias Regnant series, Hunting Party, Sporting Chance, and Winning Colors. Jo Walton has a good overview of the series at Tor.com.
However, I would have located the thing that keeps these three books from greatness in their pacing, rather than their points of view. They are oddly lumpy in spots, diffuse in others, and are really best read all together because they break at weird places—people who are impatient with drawn-out endings want to avoid these. I do like the way the fairly narrow world of the first book opens up, and most of the characters, and the competence porn (one of a set of useful terms for talking about literature that I picked up from the Internet). I’m curious to see where the series goes from here.
If you read e-books, this omnibus is available for a startlingly low price from Webscriptions. Either in print or electronic format, unfortunately, it has a whitewashed cover; Heris is explicitly described as dark-skinned.
The POV problem (or the “Let’s get back to the people I care about” problem) is mostly in the later books.
Ah, that makes sense. I mean, I did notice some places in which I wouldn’t have thought a POV shift was strictly *necessary*, but it probably wouldn’t have jumped out at me if I hadn’t been looking.
(I should have said in the post that I own the first two of these and then the fifth in the series overall; I imagine I read all of them, and getting the order confused may have been a reason why I stopped reading.)