Many of these are only 2 or 3 books to the series and there seems to be an excellent first book or two followed by an "okay" one, followed by a "milk the franchise for all we can" concluding book (kind of like Spider's Callaghan series where he was basically forced to write a book after the one he'd been forced to write, the end of which had a thermonuclear explosion in the bar.

There's a few other series and/or mini-series by Anne McCaffrey that were very good too, but I can't remember the names off the top of my head right now.
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because everyone else has one...

Then I find out that she's Megan Lindholm, whose books I also adore. (She's also written stuff with Steven Brust.)