Peter Rhodan‘s Ithria series is a bit unusual in that it’s split into two almost entirely separate storylines. And after looking through the descriptions, I decided to follow Taroniah’s and skip Kyron’s.
The first couple Taroniah novels suffer a bit from some extremely clunky dialog and occasionally repetitious segments. Normally if a character wanted to inform someone of a previous event an author would just write something like “they proceeded to recount what happened”; here though the whole scene will periodically end up recapped. Thankfully the former issue mostly resolves itself by the third novel, but the latter persists at least through the fourth. Which is the point I dropped it. For whatever reason, the author decided in that book that he wanted the protagonist to be both a battering ram and a confrontation-adverse infiltrator… and it just does not work.
Picked up Bastian Knight‘s Empire of Exiles on a whim and ended up almost immediately disappointed. The protagonist is a weird amalgam of gamer and jock, he has a bizarre habit of constantly referencing Earth-related things in conversation despite being in a fantasy world, and the romance elements are incredibly forced.