Gosh I love this book.
I’d say this is my favourite new Vorkosigan book since Komarr.
Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance is the promised “Ivan book”, the book in which Miles’s cousin Ivan finds a girl and... well, things happen. It stands alone as well as could possibly be expected for a book so late in the series. I imagine it would work perfectly well if you hadn’t read any of the other books, and I expect there will be people who will start here and like it, but my experience of reading it is inevitably shaded and enhanced by all the expectation I had of it and by the whole rest of the series.
[Read more: only very mild back-of-book type spoilers]