A cyborg drowning in emotions and an abducted Earth woman trying not to feel.

Abducted, enslaved, and constantly worried for her daughter, scientist Dr. Simone Li has had a rough few months. Now that she and her daughter, Grace, have been rescued by the fierce cyborgs of the House of Rone, she’s trying to make a life for them on the desert world of Carthago. But guilt and worry are eating at her…Toren—a once-emotionless cyborg—was injured rescuing them from the dangerous Edull aliens. Now, he’s inundated with emotions and not coping. Drawn to the wounded cyborg, Simone must find a way to help him and still protect her battered heart.

Bred to be a warlord’s personal cyborg, Toren has prided himself on being a cool, precise fighter dedicated to his house and imperator. Now his entire life has been torn apart. He’s broken, useless, and sidelined as an elite House of Rone cyborg. Every minute of every day, he struggles through a deluge of unfamiliar emotions and wants revenge…and only one woman calms the storm.

Desperate to bring down the Edull and rescue another abducted woman, Toren and Simone go undercover in the desert. Despite the dangers around them, these two tortured souls can no longer fight their intense attraction and the pull of fierce, overwhelming emotion. But Toren will soon have a choice to make: risk it all for love or go back to being the emotionless warrior he’s always been.

My Review:

I decided on Paladin today because I knew exactly what I would be getting from this latest entry in Hackett’s swords, sandals and occasionally spaceships series. Considering that yesterday’s book and tomorrow’s book are both a bit out there in terms of storytelling, I really felt like something a bit straightforward here in the middle.

Not that gladiators in space is exactly straightforward, but the storytelling in this series, like all of this author’s marvelous stories, reliably goes from point A to point B to point C – usually meaning SF (or occasionally action-adventure) meets romance, two lonely and/or somewhat scarred people meet (often briefly in the previous book in their series), figure out that they make each other strong in their broken places, get themselves in serious hot water with the big bad of the series, rescue each other and live happy for now with a happy ever after on the horizon when the series wraps up and the big bad is sent to whatever version of hell their beliefs and ours say they have definitely earned and certainly deserve.

And so it is in Paladin, with the added fillip that all the romances in the House of Rone spinoff from the Galactic Gladiators series feature cyborg warriors discovering that they have hearts and emotions after all, no matter how successfully they’ve managed to pretend otherwise until now. And in this particular entry in the series, the female refugee from Earth comes with her very own plus-one in the form of her daughter Grace.

Grace the budding little chemist with a penchant for making things explode. A skill that is bound to come in plenty handy on Carthago.

Grace’s mother Simone has survived the one-way trip from our Solar System as well as captivity and enslavement by the big bad for this series, the evil bot-making Edull. She’s just starting to get her feet under her again, but her involvement with Toren, the cyborg who was wounded while rescuing her, may set her back emotionally as much as she moves forward physically.

The damage that the Edull inflicted on Toren during her rescue has stripped away his primary cyborg weapon and the emotional distance that was part and parcel of his many, many implants. Now that he suddenly has emotions, he’s unable to control them and unfit for being part of the security that keeps the House of Rone and its inhabitants safe from the dark things that thrive in the shadows of Carthago and the Kor Magna Arena.

Dark and deadly things – and people – like the Edull and their bots.

Toren claims to want nothing more than to be stable enough to regain all his implants and the emotional lockdown that goes with them. But Simone can’t seem to stop herself from reaching out to him, no matter how much his need to pull himself away reminds her of the worst of her marriage back on Earth.

But in investigating their current lead to both the Edull and the female Earth engineer that they know is still a captive, Toren and Simone are forced to rely on each other and get past their emotional blocks.

Whether they can save the day – or even each other – forms the beating heart of this entry in this nonstop action/adventure/science fiction romance.

Escape Rating B: As much as I ALWAYS enjoy this author’s work, I’m not having nearly as much fun with the House of Rone as I did with the first series on Carthago, Galactic Gladiators.

And it seems to come down to two things. The first is that as interesting as each of the individual cyborg heroes are in the House of Rone, they are ALL coming from a very similar headspace and lack of heart space. They either haven’t had emotions or have had to suppress their emotions all of their adult lives, only to discover with the advent of the refugees from Earth that, well, the Tin Man has a heart after all. It feels like they need a Scarecrow and a Cowardly Lion to balance things out. Or someone coming from a different place.

Not that the women they fall for don’t show plenty of variety, because they certainly do. But the men, not so much.

The other thing that makes this series less compelling for me are the villains. As a reader, I don’t know why the Edull do what they do or are what they are. In the author’s Hell Squad series, I may hate the invading Gizzida but I know enough about their motivations to know that they make sense from their perspective. They are evil from our perspective, but not from their own.

The Edull seem to be a race of mad scientists, or at least mad engineers, who are evil for evil’s sake. There’s a piece missing and it makes them less comprehendible. I need to see that from their own point of view they are more than just BWAHAHA evil – and I’m not there yet.

Maybe in the next book in the series, later this year.

Rescued from her alien captors, the only person who makes her feel safe is a cold, emotionless cyborg.

Abducted from her exploration ship, paramedic Sage McAlister has spent months locked in cells and labs belonging to the Edull. Rescued by the cool, powerful cyborgs of the House of Rone, she finds herself among fellow human survivors on the desert world of Carthago. But despite being free, Sage feels cold inside and is struggling to cope. The only person she feels safe with—who she doesn’t feel the need to pretend with—is a deadly cyborg who feels nothing.

Forced into a military cyborg program as a teen, all Acton Vonn remembers of his past are violent missions and the cybernetic enhancements forced on him before he broke free. His emotions have been dampened to nothing for decades and he’s fine with that. It makes him an efficient member of the House of Rone. Yet the more time he spends with the copper-haired woman he helped rescue from the Edull, the more unfamiliar, strange, and perplexing things he starts to feel.

When a tip reveals that more humans are being held captive at a mysterious desert lake, Sage will stop at nothing to help rescue her crewmates. As she is drawn closer to Acton, she worries about risking her heart. Being with Sage breaks down barriers inside Acton and he struggles with the emotions he doesn’t want to feel. But deep in Carthago’s dangerous deserts, with the Edull hunting them, Sage and Acton will have to risk it all: their lives, their hearts, their souls.

My Review:

I read Centurion in bits and pieces, which was kind of surprising for a book that checks in at just under 250 pages and is written by an author I love in a series that I have enjoyed very much.

Nevertheless, I picked it up and liked what I read but just didn’t feel compelled to finish. But I had a relatively short airplane ride and no internet and there you go, book done.

Which leads me to write about why I didn’t feel compelled, why I finished it anyway, what I liked and what didn’t quite grab me.

So here we are.

The House of Rone series is a sequel series to the author’s Galactic Gladiators series, which I loved and didn’t really want to see end. So I was really glad when it didn’t.

The premise for the whole thing is that a temporary wormhole opened up between our solar system, specifically near Jupiter Station which sets this story in a future that is not-too-distant, and the very far distant indeed other end of the galaxy in the vicinity of a planet called Carthago.

(Carthago is a play on Carthage, and all resemblances to anything vaguely reminiscent of what we think of as the “blood and sandals” school of Greco-Roman history definitely apply. Only with lots of futuristic tech built in.)

And, in true SF fashion, that wormhole was exploited by the scum of this and every other galaxy – slave traders. Said scum scoop up everyone they can before the wormhole closes. So far, we know they grabbed everyone they could from both Jupiter Station and at least one ship in the area before they hightailed it back home.

The stories in both the Galactic Gladiators series and the House of Rone spin-off revolve around the rescue, one by one, of all of the Terran refugees, who then manage to make new lives for themselves by falling in love, usually with one of the gladiators from the Kor Magna Arena – hence the original series title.

While patterns did emerge during the first series, there were plenty of variations on the theme. Including one where the refugee was male and the gladiator was female – and there need to be a few more like that. The refugees all had, found or adopted a variety of professions upon their recovery. And not all of the locals were completely human, nor were all of the locals gladiators – although one was a cyborg, the Imperator of the House of Rone. They all came into the story with slightly different origin stories and original traumas.

So there was an overall pattern but plenty of variation within that pattern.

The difference so far within the House of Rone series is that all of those local heroes (and so far it’s all been heroes) are all cyborgs – because that is what the House of Rone specializes in. And so far, all of them are coming from a very similar headspace – that they are too much machine to make enough emotional connections to fall in love – and that most of them were, until the advent of those Terran refugees, happy (well, content, anyway, because these guys didn’t actually DO happy) to remain that way.

The women have come from different emotional places. Sage, the heroine of Centurion, was interesting because before and during her captivity she projected an air of total optimism. She was everyone’s ray of sunshine. Now that she’s free, she feels frozen. She’s having problems accessing her own emotions, but feels the need to fake it for the other women from Earth. She initially becomes friends with the cyborg Acton because he doesn’t show or seemingly have emotion and she doesn’t have to pretend for him.

The way that Sage comes back to life, and back to herself, felt genuine, where Acton’s emotional flowering felt contrived and much too quick.

To put it another way, I liked her but didn’t warm up to him – even as he warmed up.

I’m also having a more difficult time with the villains of this series, the Edull, than I did with the Thraxian slavers – and doesn’t THAT sound wrong.

But the Thraxians, as awful as they were, were just mercenaries. I don’t agree with their actions, but their motivation is pretty simple. They’re in it for the money. As long as they have buyers, they’ll be selling.

On my other hand – probably a cyborg one at that – the Edull don’t make a lot of sense, or at least not yet.

They are tinkers. They take scrap metal and parts and (rather ingeniously) turn them into robots. At first they were just using slaves, including the human slaves, to perform backbreaking labor. Which was awful and terrible enough. Now they’re using the slaves for parts for the robots. They’ve slipped from being horrible to being extra-super-crazy evil. There is a mercenary element to this, of course. They do sell the robots. But it seems like there’s more and I’m not getting it.

And it may just be that we haven’t had a chance to see into their heads yet – as disgusting as that’s likely to be. But for a villain – particularly an entire villainous race – the reader needs to understand why they’re villainous – not just that they ARE villainous. In the author’s Hell Squad series we’re not supposed to like the evil Gizzida, but we do KNOW why they do what they do. In its way, it makes them even more frightening.

I’m just not there yet for the Edull. They feel like they are getting more evil for evil’s sake, and it’s not enough.

Escape Rating B: As I said, I liked Sage a lot. I’m still enjoying the setting and setup of this series, and will definitely continue to follow it. But it’s starting to need something more for me to really love it. Hopefully next time we’re back on Carthago I’ll get some of my answers.