A review by sherwoodreads
Star Nomad by Lindsay Buroker

Alisa Marchenko has finally recovered from injuries sustained in the final battle between the Empire and the Alliance who worked for fifty years to bring the empire down. She's a long way from the place her daughter is being kept--without her husband, who died in the war.

Alisa is stuck on a horrible planet with no money, and no way to get home. Having been a hotshot pilot, she goes to a junkyard where she remembers her mother's old freighter having been dumped, along with Mica, an engineer with whom Alisa had served. The two women have to fight their way past scavengers to get to the freighter--just to discover that one of the empire's elite cyborg fighters has been squatting there. They can't turf him out, so they take off, to discover that the chaos on the dirtball planet extends a lot farther than they expected.

Alisa's idea is to take passengers to the word her daughter is staying at, in order to scrape together enough funds for fuel, water, and supplies, and repair as they go, but they keep falling into adventures, the least of which is a chase through an asteroid belt.

Ever since I first read Buroker's Emperor's Edge books, with their delightful mix of fantasy and SFnal tropes, I've wondered why she wasn't writing space opera. Well, now she is, and this has everything I love about space opera: great characters, action, some intriguing mysteries, and that sense that things are not always what they seem. All stitched together with the gold of humor.

I have high hopes for this series.