All My Sins Remembered

Otto McGavin is a 23rd century Anglo Buddhist interested in joining the Confederacion, an intergalactic peacekeeping agency dedicated to protecting the rights of indigenous species on the many planets they now share with humans. He gets the job, but after a period of training, largely under hypnosis, he finds that he is now a Prime Operative, an assassin who will go in body-modified disguises on missions that he did not foresee for himself, but that his bosses have through testing learned he is well-suited for.

This 1977 novel is three short stories, two published in magazines in 1971 and 1974, that are linked only by the lead character and that each involves an assassination on a distant planet. The two earlier stories are straightforward SF spy tales with a modicum of action in exotic extraterrestrial locales. The third story, with its engaging giant cockroach aliens who might hold the secret to a new, unlimited power source, is by far the best of the lot. What holds the books together are the interviews and debriefing sessions that provide the opening and closing chapters and separate each story. McGavin has become an expert PO who is approaching an early retirement that few in his field live to see. But this is a Joe Haldeman book, and his dim view of a military establishment that will use up it operatives until they are no longer viable darkens the adventures he has provided for the past 200 pages.