The latter works that focus on Honer herself do get rather rarified. That's what happens when your main character gets promoted out of the front lines. But the newer novels which focus on characters that were younger/secondary characters in earlier works still have a fairly high percentage of Horatio Hornblower moments. "Crown of Slaves" in particular reads very much like a Traveller adventure: the PCs are sent Somewhere Far Away to snoop around and see if they can figure out how to fix an embarrassing-for-their-Patron situation but with nothing much in the way of resources . . . and much hilarity ensues.