Been Reading: Richard Reinsmith - The Savage Stars (1981)

 The blurb from the back cover. 
"War erupts with a vicious alien race that is scattered across galaxies. The USS Corsair, severely damaged, is forced to land on an uncharted world inhabited only by savage animals.
  The ship is permanently down, and it was carrying no supplies. The three hundred crew members are not trained in colonisation. Somehow, they must survive. soon, and with much pain, a society evolves - one that mankind has never before seen.
 After hundreds of years, the rigid and repressive society has created a distinct class structure - Guiders, Techs, Hunters, Tree people...but a violent and full-scale revolution is close at hand"

Which is a wee bit misleading.
 
 The early days of the colony are covered with a few brief diary entries and then only to explain how the current society has evolved.
At no point do hostile aliens show up and the only thing remotely resembling the book cover is a brief scene midway through that quickly skips past into something else.  There is at least one woman in a bikini though.

 So,  here's what actually happens:

  The Human colonists on the planet have essentially split into two cultures:  The citizens of Homebase have all the tech and all the women and use both to keep the rest - a collection of semi-barbaric forest tribes - in line.
  Tiger Hunter Eric has become enamoured of the lovely Alicia after his hard-earned night with her. He decides that he's going to take her away from her tower in Homebase, preferably with her consent but if all else fails, he'll tie her hands together and sling her over his shoulder.
In the process of running off with Alicia, Eric inadvertently triggers an uprising by the forest tribes before meeting up with a long-lost colony who may just have a way of getting back into space.

  This might have the makings of an entertaining tale if the author hadn't tried to cram the whole thing into 192 pages.

  There's a lot of plot elements that get introduced in the first 80% of the book - the imminent hostilities between the Forest tribes and the Homebase ... a captured young woman plots revenge on the man who's tortured and abused her ... Alicia and Eric find their relationship under strain - but towards the end the story is being told in little snapshots that don't really hang together. It's like setting a DVD to randomly skip every other scene. You can still get the sense of what's going on but you don't half miss a lot.
  After I finished this I went online just to see if there was a sequel that tied everything up.  Nope.
This is all you get. Fill in the blanks yourself. (Personally I've decided that in my version of the story at least one character gets a much happier ending and isn't brutally dumped out of the plot to make way for a new love-interest. Which doesn't go anywhere anyway.)

 So, potentially interesting story that's let down by the author not quite finishing the damn story, as well as....another slight issue.

  Normally this is the sort of book I read once then leave on the bus but since one scene is right out of the nastier "Gor" books I can't even do that. (Trust me, it really isn't very nice.)

I paid £1 for this. I can't in all conscience say it was worth it.