#BookReview: Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman

#BookReview: Notes from a Regicide by Isaac FellmanNotes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: fantasy, relationship fiction, science fiction
Pages: 336
Published by Tor Books on April 15, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Notes from a Regicide is a heartbreaking story of trans self-discovery with a rich relatability and a science-fictional twist from award-winning author Isaac Fellman.
When your parents die, you find out who they really were.
Griffon Keming’s second parents saved him from his abusive family. They taught him how to be trans, paid for his transition, and tried to love him as best they could. But Griffon’s new parents had troubles of their own – both were deeply scarred by the lives they lived before Griffon, the struggles they faced to become themselves, and the failed revolution that drove them from their homeland. When they died, they left an unfillable hole in his heart.
Griffon’s best clue to his parents’ lives is in his father’s journal, written from a jail cell while he awaited execution. Stained with blood, grief, and tears, these pages struggle to contain the love story of two artists on fire. With the journal in hand, Griffon hopes to pin down his relationship to these wonderful and strange people for whom time always seemed to be running out.
In Notes from a Regicide, a trans family saga set in a far-off, familiar future, Isaac Fellman goes beyond the concept of found family to examine how deeply we can be healed and hurt by those we choose to love.

My Review:

The story begins at the end, which doesn’t mean that either the narrator or the reader is in any way spoiled about how it began. Because that’s the point of it from the beginning.

Griffon Keming is trying to understand who his parents really were before they became his parents, now that their larger-than-life personas are no longer there to get in the way of that knowing. And because they’re gone, and he misses them, he’s trying to process that grief and that absence and memorialize them – at least for himself. Or perhaps in a way that’s JUST for himself, as a way of bringing them back to life one last time.

But he only knew his parents after the point in which they came into each other’s lives, when he was fifteen and they were into their forties. The places and events that made Zaffre and Etoine Keming, and the things that made them famous, were already behind them. Already memories and nightmares that may still have influence but they have no desire to exhume for either the enlightenment or the amusement of their adopted son.

So, in the wake of their passing, in what was once Zaffre and Etoine’s New York City apartment, Griffon discovers the writings his father left behind. An angry, angst-filled, sometimes ranting and raging diary of his decades of sobriety, and a manuscript that Etoine had titled Autoportrait, Blessê in his native language, Stephensportois.

But that autobiography wasn’t so much an autobiography of Etoine as it was an attempt to immortalize Zaffre, the woman he loved so much that, once upon a time, he killed a king for her.

Escape Rating B: There are multiple avenues of approach to Notes from a Regicide. The above was the way I got into this book and found my way through it, but it may tell a different story for each reader.

For some, the most obvious point of entry may be that Griffon, Etoine and Zaffre were all trans, and this is the story of the family they created together out of love and choice. A family that was far from perfect but that worked for them and that nurtured Griffon into a healthy adulthood after a childhood filled with physical and emotional abuse.

It can be interpreted as three broken people who made each other strong in their broken places – which were legion and not limited to Zaffre’s neurodiversity, Etoine’s alcoholism and the mental contortions Griffon forced himself to go through in order to protect his birth father from the consequences of his abuse of his own child. No one comes out of any of those things unscathed.

And then there’s the part that initially caught my curiosity, the question raised by the title. Who was the ruler, and where, and why were they murdered? That’s where the story slips into speculative fiction – somewhere on the border between science fiction and fantasy.

Because Stephensport is one of those places that’s on no map we know, that perhaps may have or will exist in a bit of a fever dream – or a drunken hallucination. And the story of Stephensport is the story of a bloody revolution that arose in paranoia and ended in exile, that brought down a tyranny and ended a dream and a nightmare at the same time.

Exactly how a reader will feel about Stephensport and the rebellion that Etoine accidentally fomented and Zaffre willingly fostered will depend a lot on how much one wants to believe it happened versus just how unreliable a narrator one believes Etoine to be. And I’m not at all sure but fascinated either way.

And if part of that fascination is related to T. Kingfisher’s Sworn Soldier series that begins with the chilling and awesome folkloric horror of What Moves the Dead, set in the equally fictional country of Ruravia, that’s just fine with this reader.

In the end – as it was in the beginning – Notes from a Regicide is two things for certain. It’s a passionate love story between two beautifully damaged people, Zaffre and Etoine, because that’s the way Etoine wrote his Autoportrait. And it’s a son’s last love letter to the parents of his heart.

#BookReview: Last Chance to Save the World by Beth Revis

#BookReview: Last Chance to Save the World by Beth RevisLast Chance to Save the World (Chaotic Orbits #3) by Beth Revis
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction, science fiction romance, space opera
Series: Chaotic Orbits #3
Pages: 133
Published by DAW on April 8, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

The explosive, satisfying conclusion to the Chaotic Orbits novella trilogy sees Ada and Rian breaking into a high-security facility to give Earth a fighting chance at survival

Sexy, fast, fun and funny, this happily-ever-after ending is perfect for fans of the Murderbot novels and the Wayfarers series

After a few weeks trapped on board a spaceship with Ada (and, oh look, there’s only one bed), Rian has to admit that maybe Ada’s rebels have a point. The nanobots poised to be unleashed on Earth are infected with malware that will ultimately leave the residents of Earth in a worse position than they’re in now. But is it too late?

Ada and Rian arrive on Earth with little time to spare. Together, they have to break into a high-security facility and infect the nanobots with a counter-virus before they’re released in order to give Earth a fighting chance. And if Ada happens to notice some great tech laying around in this high-security facility she shouldn’t have access to and then happens to steal a bunch of it when Rian’s not looking? Well, he knew who she was before he teamed up with her. And if he wants it back, he’s going to have to catch her first.

With countless twists and turns, this enemies-to-lovers slow-burn and high-tension romance plays on a Sherlock and Moriarity character dynamic rooted in science fiction with a heavy romance and mystery angle.

My Review:

Ada Lamarr’s caper-and-heist riddled ‘chaotic orbit’ of the galaxy is on its way back to a corporate controlled, pollution ravaged Sol-Earth when this third entry in the series opens. Ada and her reluctant passenger, government agent Rian White, have finalized their plans to thwart an evil corporate kingpin who planned to hold Earth’s environmental recovery for ransom for the next, well, forever.

Of course, no plan survives contact with the enemy. The second biggest problem with this plan is that the first enemies it has to survive are each other, because Ada and Rian, no matter how much they might be on the same page when it comes to Earth’s potential recovery – are enemies in every other way.

They might both wish that they were enemies-with-benefits, but they are also both smart enough not to get that deeply involved – all puns intended – with someone they can’t trust. Particularly when they know that said enemy ALREADY has plans to betray them at the first available opportunity.

But the real problem, at least from Ada’s perspective, is that the first enemy that her plan has to survive isn’t the uptight government agent she’s been lusting after since they crashed into each other in Full Speed to a Crash Landing.

The first enemy Ada’s plan has to get passed isn’t Rian, it isn’t the government, it isn’t even the squadrons of corporate security drones and goons her target has stationed to protect his ‘investment’.

First, foremost and with way less prep than Ada ever likes to have, Ada has to get her crazy, convoluted scheme past her mother.

Escape Rating B+: A HUGE part of the fun of the Chaotic Orbits series in both Full Speed to a Crash Landing and How to Steal a Galaxy is that the story is told from the inside of Ada Lamarr’s, wheels-within-wheels, lies-hiding-lies and misdirections all around very intelligent and utterly snarky head.

Which means that we’re aware that Ada is pulling some kind of con – but not necessarily the same con – on every single person around her. Including herself. So even though we’re in her very own skull there are still secrets that aren’t revealed until the very end of the caper – if not a bit after – because there are plenty of things in Ada’s mind and heart that she doesn’t want to think about. Possibly ever.

The biggest thing she’s not willing to think about is her sure and certain knowledge that Rian is going to betray her in the end – if he hasn’t already. It’s only fair, because her plan to betray him has been baked into this caper from its opening gambit back in that first book.

The part that she’s not willing to think about is that she wishes the situation were otherwise. He’s Mister Law-and-Order. He can’t live the chaotic, one-step-ahead-of-the-authorities, the ends-justify-the-means-as-long-as-there’s-a-big-payday, next-heist-please life that Ada thrives on.

And those natures are much too baked into both of their psyches for either of them to ever change. So in addition to her many, many thoughts and concerns about her plans for this particular caper, Ada also spends a lot of her internal energy veering away from the heartbreak she tried to avoid but knows, deep in her heart, is coming anyway.

So, on the top level of this story, the takedown of the stupid evil villain/greedy corporate monster, the thing that Ada has been working on from before the beginning of the series, and every single lie and misdirect since – all of that is absolutely righteous. And it’s a win all the way around. Earth has a chance to get better – if we don’t screw it up again.

But the catharsis of that HUGE win is blunted because we’re pretty much all on Team Ada, we’re all shipping Ada and Rian – and their relationship takes a HUGE, messy hit in this story. They’ve both been forced to realize that what they feel for each other, as totally ill-advised as it might be, is also absolutely real. And that they can’t both be themselves AND have each other.

That part of the story ends on a note of possibility, both for Ada and Rian finding each other again and for that finding to be part of another caper/heist of some sort. Whether that means another book in the series, or was just a way to end things with a hint of will they/won’t they/can they/should they is something we’ll hopefully see in the future. Which means that the HEA promised in the blurb is still some ways off – at best.

As for this reader, I want to keep right on shipping Ada and Rian, but I can’t see a way to make it work. I hope the author can, and that we ALL get to see it!

A- #AudioBookReview: Trap Line by Timothy Zahn

A- #AudioBookReview: Trap Line by Timothy ZahnTrap Line by Timothy Zahn
Narrator: Greg D. Barnett
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: borrowed from Amazon Kindle Unlimited
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction, space opera
Pages: 49
Length: 1 hour and 21 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on March 25, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazon
Goodreads

An engineer’s groundbreaking solo mission is rudely interrupted when he stumbles into an interstellar trap. The New York Times bestselling author of the Thrawn trilogy is back with a wholly original short story of first contact.
En route to far-off stars, Toby’s consciousness has a crucial mission: inhabit his clone long enough to repair a spaceship, then zip back to Earth. He’s done it a million times, more or less. OK, twelve times. It should only take a few hours.
Until he wakes up in jail. And he’s not alone.
His fellow prisoners: a cadre of alien soldiers. His prison: an ethereal boundary that will imprison their spirits until their bodies die. His jailers can’t even see him. But their pet cat (er, iguana cat?) can—and it’s got a serious case of the zoomies.
With humanity’s place in the odd and ever-widening universe riding on Toby’s choices, it’s time to saddle up for a ghostly game of cat and mouse.

My Review:

What Toby Collier comes to appreciate when his ‘astral’ manifests in an alien trap instead of aboard the Terran FarJump ship Janus out in the far flung galaxy is something attributed to poet William Butler Yeats centuries before Toby was born, that “There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met.”

Certainly neither Toby, nor anyone from Earth, has ever met anyone similar to the vaguely avian-like Hyfisk, the soldiers with whom Toby is trapped in a small, family-operated space ship in the middle of the great, wide galaxy that all of them were traversing.

The family, Porpou, his wife, their daughter Ibbi and her ‘iguana cat’ Bisqitty, make their living by trapping astrals like Toby and the Hyfisks and reporting them to the ‘Overmasters’, whoever or whatever THEY are. For the family, it’s a living – if not necessarily a luxurious or even steady one.

But the trap is a roadblock for the astrals, an interruption that will lead to Toby’s death when he doesn’t complete his job out on the far reaches of human-discovered space and return in a reasonable time frame. Because his bosses will cut their losses along with the life-support of his physical body.

The Hyfisks’ situation is more dire – they are soldiers on the way to defend an important colony from an aggressive enemy. Not that they also won’t die when their life support is cut, but their duty is more important to them than their individual lives.

Except that they have been stuck in that trap long enough to give up. Toby, freshly trapped, hasn’t. And is determined not to. He’s also an engineer rather than a soldier, and he hasn’t yet met a puzzle that he’s not going to at least attempt to solve.

The Hyfisk can’t solve the problem with the knowledge they have. Toby, on the other hand, brings fresh – if non-corporeal – eyes and mind to the same problem and figures out that if they share their knowledge, they can escape. If they trust each other enough.

And if they can get the iguana cat to cooperate – which might be the most difficult part of the whole thing. Her name isn’t pronounced ‘BisKITTY’ for nothing.

Escape Rating A-: Trap Line turned out to be a whole lot of fun and I’m very glad I listened to/read it. Even though I initially picked it up because I was having a difficult time getting into anything. Monday’s book seriously did a number on my concentration, but this little story turned out to be the cure.

I picked this up through Kindle Unlimited – a subscription I get happier about all the time. It was fun, it was quick, the audio narrator did a great job portraying Toby AND the Hyfisks and it all just made for the reading pick-me-up I was desperate for.

For an SF story, Trap Line was surprisingly cozy. It’s a small cast in an even smaller setting, just ten Hyfisks, three insectoid aliens, an iguana cat, and Toby. It’s also small in length, but it sets itself well AND gives the reader just enough to get why and how Toby and Irion, the commander of the Hyfisks, manage to come to (mostly) trust each other in this “enemy of my enemy is my friend’ scenario. Particularly as Toby and the humans aren’t aware of the Overmasters enough to BE their enemy – at least not yet – AND Toby manages to convince Irion that the trap-keeping family are not really an enemy to either of them. They’re all just trying to get by – like everyone else.

That this is also a story about the cleverness of humans and the inventiveness of our species instead of any attempt to win by domination or violence – and not just because it wouldn’t work in this situation AT ALL – made this a whole lot of fun, with a comforting layer of competence over the whole thing.

It broke my reading slump – and I’m incredibly grateful for that!

Even though Toby, the Hyfisks, and Porpou have no ability to communicate all together (Toby and the Hyfisks can communicate because they’re all astrals), they still manage to concoct a mutually beneficial plan that has the wonderful added benefit of sticking it to the Overmasters for all of them without the Overmasters being aware that they’ve been shafted. Toby, the Hyfisks and Porpou have made friends, even if they haven’t managed to share a single word in ANY language – and their quiet rebellion makes for a glorious – and friendly – ending to this delightful short story.

A- #BookReview: One Level Down by Mary G. Thompson

A- #BookReview: One Level Down by Mary G. ThompsonOne Level Down by Mary G. Thompson
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction
Pages: 196
Published by Tachyon Publications on April 1, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Trapped in a child’s body, a resourceful woman risks death by deletion from a simulated world. With her debut novella for adults, Mary G. Thompson (Wuftoom) has crafted a taut, ultimately hopeful story that deftly explores identity and autonomy.
“Brilliant and beautiful! One Level Down is a perfectly executed gem of a book. Deeply satisfying and completely mesmerizing, it’s full of depth, heart, and thought. A remarkable achievement!”—Sarah Beth Durst, New York Times bestselling author of The Spellshop
Ella is the oldest five-year-old in the universe. For fifty-eight years, the founder of a simulated colony-planet has forced her to pretend to be his daughter. Her “Daddy” has absolute power over all elements of reality, which keeps the colonists in line even when their needs are not met. But his failing experiments and despotic need for absolute control are increasingly dangerous.
Ella’s very life depends on her performance as a child. She has watched Daddy delete her stepmother and the loved ones of anyone who helps her.
But every sixty years, a Technician comes from the world above. Ella has been watching and working and biding her time. Because if she cannot make the technician help her, the only solution is a desperate measure that could lead to consequences for the entire universe.

My Review:

For a rather short book, One Level Down tackles some really huge questions about the nature of reality.

The stage in which those questions play out is a tiny human colony in a not too distant future far from Earth. Or so it seems.

Because the colony of Bella Inizio both is and isn’t what it seems – and neither is founder Philip Harkin’s five year old daughter Ella. Come to think of it, Harkin isn’t exactly what he seems, either.

There’s a lot of that going around, like Russian nesting dolls, because that’s what Harkin’s Bella Inizio is, the smallest doll in a nest of simulated worlds built and maintained by Clawhammer Corporation and their rival, Pocket Parts.

As has been seen in plenty of SF stories, colonization is not easy. Golden worlds turn out to be tarnished, Class M planets turn out to have predatory inhabitants, worlds that looked perfect from light years away are discovered to contain deadly pathogens that can’t be seen from space.

That’s the case of the original Bella Inizio. The rich veins of precious minerals combined with a pristine ecology drew the colonists in – and the deadly gastrointestinal disease killed them off. Then Clawhammer swept in – as they did on so many other colony worlds – and made a deal with the remaining inhabitants. They bought the mineral rights to the planet, and in return set the colony up in a pocket universe, created to match the colonists’ requirements, safe from the disease that nearly wiped them out but locked away forever in a microcosm of the universe they once explored.

Except that Bella Inizio was owned in its entirely by one single homesteader – Philip Harkin. And his requirements for the pocket world were specially weighted in his favor and under his control – especially control of his daughter Ella, who had remained trapped, under his thumb, at the mercy of his fists, and perpetually five years old in body but not in mind – for the entire 58 years of the pocket world’s existence.

While she watched her father exert his life and death power over anyone who defied him in any way – but especially over anyone who questioned his treatment of Ella herself.

But Ella had plans and dreams of her own – plans that did not include staying trapped. And she had managed to gain just enough knowledge of the world outside to know that her opportunity was coming – if she could just figure out a way to seize it – and be free.

Escape Rating A-: There are not one but two really big questions that get tackled in this tiny novel. The larger – and more SFnal question – is the one about the nature of reality. The smaller but entirely too real question is about collaboration, and I don’t mean the good, cooperative kind. I mean the traitorous kind that leads to leaving one miserable and desperate little girl in the hands of a monster so that everyone else can have a happy life.

The universe of Harkin’s Bella Inizio is based on a conceptual framework that the universe is a seemingly vast simulation – a ginormous pocket world that is nested within an even bigger pocket world and could conceivably have an infinite number of small pocket worlds nested within it.

This idea gets played with from an entirely different angle in Brenda Peynado’s recent novella, Time’s Agent – but those pocket dimensions are discovered and not made-to-order. It could also be imagined as the kind of holodeck bubble that Moriarty is trapped in in the Star Trek Next Gen episode Ship in a Bottle. Or perhaps the computer simulation that is utilized in the Doctor Who episode Forest of the Dead.

In other words, this concept has been played with before, this time combined with more than a bit of corporate greed and an even more SFnal solution to the dangers of colonization than was faced in Mickey7.

What tips this particular story over the edge into both WOW and SCARY at the same time is the human dimension. Harkin is abusive to both his daughter and to the other colonists, who are, in their turn, abusing Ella as well so as not to upset their own personal applecarts. Or, to be more charitable – for certainly really awful definitions of charitable – are making the best of their own terrible situation by leaving her to suffer in worse. The way that the reader’s sympathy for them is stripped away at the end was rather breathtaking in its audacity.

As is Ella’s righteous takedown of the whole big ball of wrong in the surprising – but absolutely justified – conclusion.

#BookReview: Hunter Squad: North by Anna Hackett

#BookReview: Hunter Squad: North by Anna HackettNorth (Hunter Squad) by Anna Hackett
Format: eARC
Source: author
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: action adventure romance, science fiction, science fiction romance
Pages: 210
Published by Anna Hackett on April 3, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsiteAmazon
Goodreads

We survived the invasion and beat the aliens. But they left something behind…
I was born to protect. I’m a Connors, a soldier like my father before me, and I’m the medic for Hunter Squad. Every time we go out to hunt the mutated monsters the aliens left behind, I’m there to treat anyone who gets hurt.
But sometimes, I can’t always save everyone, and that haunts me.
When Hunter Squad is called out to rescue two missing boys, I’ll do anything to bring them home alive. Even work with our brand-new recruit, Jessica Ramos.
I’m not convinced she’s the right fit for the team, but she’s an expert when it comes to monsters. The creatures are exhibiting dangerous new behaviors, and we have to stop them. Whatever it takes.
Working alongside Jess, everything about her gets under my skin: her confidence, her intelligence, her fit, curvy body, and her damn freckles.
When old memories come back to haunt me, it’s Jess who helps me. Jess who draws me in a way no woman ever has. I can’t afford to let myself care for her.
Falling in love is not on my agenda.

My Review:

The first book in the Hunter Squad  series, Jameson, set up this world as it is 30 years after the Hell Squad series came to its explosive Independence Day style ending. This second book sets up the new BIG BAD, the whoever/whatever that is somehow managing to train bands of formerly dumb and disorganized Gizzida/terran hybrids into teams capable of planning, coordinating and outright luring the human defenders into what someone or something hopes they can turn into a no-win scenario – for the humans.

In other words, the fragile – not exactly peace but not outright war – that has existed since the “pure” Gizzida got knocked back into space is heating up from a simmer back to a boil. The hybrids aren’t merely on the move – they are on the attack. And they are suddenly a whole lot better at that than they used to be – which is absolutely not a good thing for the slowly rebuilding human population.

Hunter Squad, made up of the literal ‘next generation’ of the Hell Squad, has the necessary but unenviable task of hunting down packs of Gizzida/terran hybrids who are attacking human settlements. While that’s been their job for a while, it’s only on this particular hunt that they realize that lone humans have been disappearing on an increasing basis over the past several months – because they find out what happened to a few of them and it isn’t pretty.

It’s more like Shelob in The Two Towers – only worse. Because Shelob’s depredations were mostly – not totally but mostly – about the great spider protecting her own territory and maintaining her own food supply. Nature may be red in tooth and claw, but that’s what nature is supposed to be – even if humans still end up on the sharp and pointy end of that cliche a lot more than they’s like.

The unnatural spiderweb-like fuckery that Hunter Squad discovers in this second entry in the series doesn’t seem to be about preserving food – but it might be about preserving specimens for exactly the sort of lab experiments that the Gizzida used to do. The kind of experiments that created the hybrids that Hunter Squad is still fighting 30 years later.

Just as the overall situation is getting darker and more dangerous, a bright, hot light blazes through this story in the burn-the-sheets sex-into-love romance between Hunter Squad’s medic, North Connors, and the squad’s newest member, Jessica Ramos.

She doesn’t want to mess up her just barely started membership in Hunter Squad. It took a lot of time and effort to get from North America to Australia, and she has a lot of important research to do on the hybrids. She can’t afford to get sidetracked by a handsome face and the body to go with it.

Especially when that handsome face seems to scrunch up in distaste every time North lays eyes on her. She’s not remotely interested in a personal relationship with someone who can’t seem to stand her presence.

It’s going to take a crisis – or two or three – for North and Jessica to figure out that they’ve been reading each other’s signals very, very wrong all along.

Escape Rating B: As with Jameson, and with the original Hell Squad series, this story runs along on two distinct tracks that intersect at – ahem – climactic moments. There’s the big, overarching plot of the series, and then there’s the romance in this particular ‘chapter’ of that story.

The romance in this one is between North Connors, son of Ash Connors and Marin Mitchell, and Jessica Ramos, one of Cruz Ramos’ cousins from North America. So they both have history to live up to, which is clearly going to be a theme of this series. North is a medic, and Jessica hunts monsters in order to study them.

This isn’t exactly a relationship made in heaven – at least not at the beginning. He has demons when it comes to not being able to save ALL his patients. He’s afraid to get close to anyone – and he’s a bit of a dick about it because Jessica gets under his skin in ways he’s not comfortable with.

Jessica may be attracted to what he looks like, but his behavior is off-putting, because, well, he’s being a dick in ways that make her believe he doesn’t have any faith in her abilities. That they fall into bed anyway and eventually into love isn’t a surprise, exactly, but damn it happened really fast. I liked the romance in Jameson better because it wasn’t instalove the way this one turned out to be.

Very much on my other hand, I’m every bit as fascinated with the overall plot as I was with the first series. It makes so much sense that, just as the humans are rebuilding, the hybrids are as well. The invading Gizzida were just that, invaders from another world. They wanted to strip Earth of its resources and leave an empty husk behind. They HAD to be fought.

But the hybrids they left behind are entirely other matter. They weren’t Gizzida enough to die when the anti-Gizzida device went off, but they’re sure not acting like they are willing to coexist peacefully either. We don’t yet know what their actual imperative is – but I expect we’re about to find out.

Which is the scary but fun part of this series. The hybrids look like they’re experimenting on humans – both in the sense of how the humans react to threats and campaigns, and quite possibly in the sense of turning some into lab rats for nefarious and/or deadly purposes.

We certainly get hints of an intelligent hybrid watching from the shadows. And I’ll admit to wondering just how hybrid that hybrid is. There are other frightening possibilities which I can’t wait for the author to explore in later books in this series.

Based on hints at the end of this story, it’s clear that the next romance will be between quadcopter pilot Colbie Erickson and her Hunter Squad teammate Marc Jackson. And that their adventure is going to take them into the heart of at least one hybrid base or experimental lab – as well as deep into each other’s hearts. I’m looking forward to getting a glimpse of whoever or whatever is behind the uptick in monster intelligence and capability in the coming books in the series.

But that’s going to be a while, because the author’s next several books look like they will be contemporary romance and romantic suspense. As always, I’m looking forward to whatever romantic reading adventures this author is sending my way in the months to come!

A- #BookReview: Where the Axe is Buried by Ray Nayler

A- #BookReview: Where the Axe is Buried by Ray NaylerWhere the Axe Is Buried by Ray Nayler
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: artificial intelligence, dystopian, political thriller, science fiction, technothriller
Pages: 336
Published by MCD on April 1, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

All systems fail. All societies crumble. All worlds end.
In the authoritarian Federation, there is a plot to assassinate and replace the President, a man who has downloaded his mind to a succession of new bodies to maintain his grip on power. Meanwhile, on the fringes of a Western Europe that has renounced human governance in favor of ostensibly more efficient, objective, and peaceful AI Prime Ministers, an experimental artificial mind is malfunctioning, threatening to set off a chain of events that may spell the end of the Western world.
As the Federation and the West both start to crumble, Lilia, the brilliant scientist whose invention may be central to bringing down the seemingly immortal President, goes on the run, trying to break out from a near-impenetrable web of Federation surveillance. Her fate is bound up with a worldwide group of others fighting against the global status quo: Palmer, the man Lilia left behind in London, desperate to solve the mystery of her disappearance; Zoya, a veteran activist imprisoned in the taiga, whose book has inspired a revolutionary movement; Nikolai, the President’s personal physician, who has been forced into more and more harrowing decisions as he navigates the Federation’s palace politics; and Nurlan, the hapless parliamentary staffer whose attempt to save his Republic goes terribly awry. And then there is Krotov, head of the Federation’s security services, whose plots, agents, and assassins are everywhere.
Following the success of his debut novel, The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler launches readers into a thrilling near-future world of geopolitical espionage. A cybernetic novel of political intrigue, Where the Axe is Buried combines the story of a near-impossible revolutionary operation with a blistering indictment of the many forms of authoritarianism that suffocate human freedom.

My Review:

I picked this up because I adored the author’s debut novel, The Mountain in the Sea, very much liked his later novella, The Tusks of Extinction, and was hoping for more of the same. Which I sorta/kinda got, but not in ANY of the ways that I was expecting.

I’m every bit as wowed by Axe as I was the other two, but that’s a feeling that I came to in the end even as I muddled a bit through the middle. Which is also very much like both of those previous works. Which is where that ‘sorta/kinda’ qualifier comes in.

There are three distinct locuses (loci?, focal points?) for this story; deep in the Russian Federation, the fringes of the halls of academia in England, and the halls of Parliament in a former Soviet Republic on the fringe of both the European Union and the Federation but currently part of neither.

In a near-future more-or-less dystopian world that may, or may not be on the fringe of multiple states of collapse. Whether that state is the cause of, or caused by, an artificial intelligence takeover of the reins of power is subject to interpretation.

Lots of interpretation, pretty much everywhere.

In the Russian Federation, one man plans – and has so far succeeded – in ruling forever through a process of uploading his consciousness and downloading it into a new host as each of his bodies fail. Or when the apparatus of the state determines that it is a good time for a crisis and a cleansing.

In the West, human governments have come under the control of artificial intelligence created ‘Prime Ministers’, whose mandate is to govern in humanity’s long-term best interests, no matter the short term consequences. The idea was that an AI wouldn’t need to have its wheels or its palms greased, wouldn’t be hungry for power for its own sake, and wouldn’t have a personal agenda or a need to get itself re-elected once it’s been voted into power.

But this isn’t a story about process, although process laid the groundwork for it. It’s a story about people. And that’s where things get interesting even as they fragment across multiple fault lines.

Because, of course, neither system really works – if by work you mean actually function for the good of the greatest number of its citizens. Not that the system in the Federation EVER even gave lip service to that particular idea.

However, the one thing that both systems, the Federation’s quasi-immortal President and the AI PM so-called Rationalization policies do, in their varying ways, is cement a status quo in place. Which is not nearly as good for anyone as the respective powers-that-be would want people to believe.

That’s where our widely scattered group of protagonists – or at least points of view characters come in. An old resistance fighter imprisoned in the Russian taiga, a government functionary in that former Republic, the partner of a cutting edge AI scientist in Britain, and that AI scientist, locked in a prison of her own making back in the Federation, desperate to complete her magnum opus of quantum entanglement.

Each is both observer and observed, acting on their own little piece of a world-spanning puzzle, not even aware of the puppet master pulling all of their strings.

And the puppet master themselves, the spider in the center of the web, whose motivations are not certain, even at the end, whether their goal was to give humanity a chance to try again – or merely to burn it all down.

Escape Rating A-: I have to admit that, at first, I was wondering how this was all going to come together. Then again, I had the same reaction to The Mountain in the Sea so I should have expected it.

The different points of view are worlds apart – which I realized at the end was absolutely the point. Each of the characters represents one of those fabled blind men looking at the elephant in that they can only see a tiny piece of the whole picture.

One of the difficult bits to get over, or past, particular for those of us who live in the West, is that the situation under so-called “Rationalization” isn’t all that much better than the repressive regime in the Russian Federation. No one is actually free, it’s just that the cages in the West are a bit more comfortable and one is considerably less likely to get murdered by the state.

What seems to be driving the story – at least for most of its length – is the story of that genius AI scientist Lilia. She comes back to the Federation to see her father one last time, gets trapped and goes on the run. Much of the drive of the story is wrapped around her, the shadowy figures chasing her, the ones who pretend to be helping her, the ones who are chasing them, the endless cells within cells of resistance and/or state security whose goals are never clear even to themselves.

But she’s a stalking horse – as are all the other human agents on all the possible sides – as the story gets really big and then comes down to one human who has been pulling all the strings – including their own. And that’s the point where it all suddenly made sense as all the systems come crashing down and the metaphor of the title becomes clear.

Even as the ending, in the end, feels like it isn’t. The puppet master has given humanity another chance to get it right. Or at least better. But the closing scenes lead the reader to see that, while things may be better in the short run, over the long haul the humans are gonna human, that the fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves, and that we have met the enemy and he is us.

#BookReview: Luminous by Silvia Park

#BookReview: Luminous by Silvia ParkLuminous by Silvia Park
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: artificial intelligence, dystopian, literary fiction, robots, science fiction
Pages: 400
Published by Simon & Schuster on March 11, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

A highly anticipated, sweeping debut set in a unified Korea that tells the story of three estranged siblings—two human, one robot—as they collide against the backdrop of a murder investigation to settle old scores and make sense of their shattered childhood, perfect for fans of Klara and the Sun and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

In a reunified Korea of the future, robots have been integrated into society as surrogates, servants, children, and even lovers. Though boundaries between bionic and organic frequently blur, these robots are decidedly second-class citizens. Jun and Morgan, two siblings estranged for many years, are haunted by the memory of their lost brother, Yoyo, who was warm, sensitive, and very nearly human.

Jun, a war veteran turned detective of the lowly Robot Crimes Unit in Seoul, becomes consumed by an investigation that reconnects him with his sister Morgan, now a prominent robot designer working for a top firm, who is, embarrassingly, dating one of her creations in secret.

On the other side of Seoul in a junkyard filled with abandoned robots, eleven-year-old Ruijie sifts through scraps looking for robotic parts that might support her failing body. When she discovers a robot boy named Yoyo among the piles of trash, an unlikely bond is formed since Yoyo is so lifelike, he’s unlike anything she’s seen before.

While Morgan prepares to launch the most advanced robot-boy of her career, Jun’s investigation sparks a journey through the underbelly of Seoul, unearthing deeper mysteries about the history of their country and their family. The three siblings must find their way back to each other to reckon with their pasts and the future ahead of them in this poignant and remarkable exploration of what it really means to be human.

My Review:

They are all the children of the famous, failed neuroroboticist, Cho Yosep; Jun, Morgan, and Yoyo. But the childhood they shared was long ago, long enough that Jun and Morgan have had the chance to become adults, and to become estranged from their father and each other. While Yoyo, their android older brother, has been bought and sold and become and been changed, over and over again. None of them emerged from their childhoods, or even their sometimes barely-functioning adulthoods, unscarred.

In the reunified Korea of this future, the scars of the wars that brought reunification to pass are still evident everywhere – on the people, on the land and in the rising discontent on both sides of what was once the border between two sovereign nations whose unity seems in danger of fracturing again – sooner or later.

This is also a future where robots have become ubiquitous, filling roles that were once reserved for humans as servants, caregivers, children, friends, lovers. They are always helpful, forever loyal, and permanently second-class. Or worse. Or less. Or both.

Morgan makes robots. She’s a top designer for the pre-eminent robot design and manufacturing empire in the world. On the one hand, she believes that she’s carrying on the work her father abandoned. On another, she’s indulging her own fantasies through her work, and feeling guilty about both the indulgence and the deception.

And very much on her third, and possibly robotic, hand, she’s still both mourning and searching for the robot brother her father brought into their family – and mysteriously took away.

Jun protects robots, or at least he tries his best to in a world that sees them as useful until they’re not – and then they’re scrap. Jun is a detective in the underfunded, understaffed, underappreciated Seoul Police Department’s Robot Crimes Unit. He’s never gotten over the loss of his robot brother Yoyo, just as he’ll never be able to pay off the cybernetic body modifications that allowed him to survive the catastrophic injuries he received during the last war – and to live the truth he felt in his soul.

The frame of the story is one of Jun’s cases, an investigation into the disappearance of an elderly woman’s robot caregiver, the person Kim Sunduk has relied on for years to maintain her independence and her connection to the world. Connections that have been broken along with the woman’s heart.

Among these elements, the search for a missing caregiver that leads to an underworld of robot rage cages, a woman’s desire for love and approval, a man’s need to find the truths that were hidden in his childhood, lead, by a roundabout way, to the truth about Yoyo, truths about the war that no one wants to know, and truths about love that no one is willing to see.

Escape Rating B: Luminous is very much literary science fiction, which means the family is dysfunctional, none of the characters are happy, the story is steeped in tragedy and more is angsted about than done. Literary SF is not my favorite part of the genre, and I had some hesitation going into this one. In the end, it worked better than I expected because the police investigation provides a better framework than is usual in literary fiction upon which to hang an actual plot.

There are several ways of looking at this story – more than merely the three perspectives through which it is told. From one point of view, it seems as if Jun’s police investigation is the story, and it kind of is. But the story that is told isn’t merely about one robot’s disappearance. The story is about humans, and about their relationships with the robots that are now an integral part of society. From that starting point, it manages to dive into the relationships that robots have with each other – relationships that humans are entirely unaware of and do not even expect to exist. The detective story is Jun’s perspective, the robotic relationships are Yoyo’s, and are hidden every bit as much as Yoyo himself has been.

While Morgan’s strained human relationships and her clandestine creation of her own robot companion raise questions about whether the advent of robots has furthered the fracturing of human-to-human relationships.

I was certainly caught up in Luminous as I was reading it, but now that I’ve turned the final page I have some mixed feelings about parts. One is my own problem, in that I wish I knew a lot more about Korean history up until now because I believe the conditions of this near-future would have had more impact if I had. At the same time, parts of the situation felt familiar because the human condition in general is simply what it is. War is hell, war is always hell, what gives the war scenes in this story their resonance is that we are seeing things through their perspectives, particularly Jun’s and Yoyo’s.

It feels like the heart of the story is wrapped around the relationships between humans and robots, but because we get there through the police investigation, a lot of what we see is that humans treat robots the way that humans treat any population they see as ‘less than’ whatever group is dominant. It’s also not a surprise that the robots who get destroyed by violence are mostly female-bodied. That’s it’s female-bodied robots who become caregivers and servants, and that male-bodied Yoyo is turned into a weapon.

And that that easy dichotomy is the simplest thing about relationships between humans and robots, and that everything under that iceberg tip is considerably more complex.

After turning the final page, I ended up looking back at some other recent books about human/robotic relations in order to get a better handle on why some bits seemed rather familiar, and the one I believe Luminous most reminds me of is Mechanize My Hands to War by Erin K. Wagner because it also tells a story about human attempts to program robots to do their dirty work for them, and how the robots themselves evolve in considerably more complex – and humane – directions than was originally intended. There are elements of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model, Mal Goes to War by Edward Ashton and  C. Robert Cargill’s Day Zero here also, and if that’s the part of Luminous that grabbed your attention, all are worth a read.

One final (final) note, Luminous is the author’s debut novel, and she kept me engaged in this story, in a part of the genre I don’t normally tackle, from beginning to end. I’m definitely looking forward to whatever she comes up with next!

#BookReview: When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi

#BookReview: When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John ScalziWhen the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: humorous science fiction, science fiction
Pages: 336
Published by Tor Books on March 25, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

From the New York Times bestselling author of Starter Villain comes an entirely serious take on a distinctly unserious subject: what would really happen if suddenly the moon were replaced by a giant wheel of cheese.
It's a whole new moooooon.
One day soon, suddenly and without explanation, the moon as we know it is replaced with an orb of cheese with the exact same mass. Through the length of an entire lunar cycle, from new moon to a spectacular and possibly final solar eclipse, we follow multiple characters -- schoolkids and scientists, billionaires and workers, preachers and politicians -- as they confront the strange new world they live in, and the absurd, impossible moon that now hangs above all their lives.

My Review:

You might be thinking that the title seems familiar. Or that it’s doing to you what it did to me and is giving you an earworm. It IS familiar. The whole line is, “If the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore”. I’m even hearing it in Dean Martin’s voice as it was one of his biggest hits and my parents certainly played the music of the Rat Pack around the house when I was growing up.

It’s also more than a bit of a pun for this whole entire book – especially the ending – as the moon hits pretty much everyone on Earth in the eye all the way through.

There are a lot of funny and or fanciful stories where the Moon is made of cheese. Usually green cheese – which works if the word green means “new” instead of the color. Wallace & Gromit travel to the moon to sample some of that cheese in A Grand Day Out. Wallace clearly hopes it’s his beloved Wensleydale – but sadly it’s not.

It may seem like I’ve digressed, but I’m not sure that’s true, considering the book. From a certain point of view, When the Moon Hits Your Eye could be said to be a series of digressions – or one whole entire digression. It’s certainly a series of vignettes, a month-long collection of slice of life stories all wrapped around a single, cheesy premise.

“What if the moon suddenly turned into cheese?” Not just the actual moon, but all the moon rocks carefully protected in museums and laboratories all over the Earth, right along with their point of origin.

Because that’s what happens in this book. It’s not about the science of how it happened – because no one can figure that out. At all. It’s about the reaction. All the reactions – including the reaction of the cheese itself.

Which is going to be absolutely moon-shattering – and potentially earth-shattering as well. But that’s not the point. The point is the human reaction to the cheese reaction to a fundamental change in the composition of the whole entire universe.

And it’s not good. But it is, frequently and often and wryly and ruefully, utterly hilarious.

[cover of Redshirts by John Scalzi]Escape Rating B: I ended up with a GINORMOUS cheese-wheel of mixed feelings on this one. I’ve read a fair bit of this author’s work, and let’s just say that Moon reads like a stellar reason why I’ve always said that Scalzi is a bit of an acquired taste. If you enjoy his authorial voice – it’s on full display in Moon. If you don’t, this isn’t going to change your mind.

The Scalzi story that Moon reminds me of most is Redshirts, which is as much meta as it is story and drove me a bit bananas in the reading of it. According to the author’s afterword, thematically Moon is part of a conceptual but not actual series that includes The Kaiju Preservation Society and Starter Villain, in that all three stories “share a similar conceit of ‘Everyday people dealing with an extremely high-concept situation, in contemporary settings’.”

Which circles back to the idea that this isn’t REALLY about the moon suddenly turning into cheese. It’s about the human reaction to the moon becoming cheese. And, because humans are gonna human no matter the circumstances, that reaction is frequently hilarious.

To the point where I frequently laughed so hard I shook the bed and had to go read someplace else so my husband could sleep.

That hilarity is possible because the story is carefully set so that it’s not a tragedy as a whole – although it could have been. And the one documented death that does occur – well let’s just say that a Darwin Award nomination would have been a fitting outcome and leave it at that.

Where all of this reader’s mixed feelings come into this review is that the one thing I wish Moon had that it absolutely doesn’t is any hint of causality – not even of the casual handwavium variety. It’s not just that the people in the story don’t know why it happened – because that’s true in the whole entire 1632 series by Eric Flint and THAT still works. (1632 has some EXTREMELY flimsy causality, but it’s enough to get the reader over the hump and into the story.) It’s that the reader doesn’t know either. Not why it happened and not why it stopped. It could have all been a mass hallucination – which gets argued decades after the fact – AS IT ABSOLUTELY WOULD.

Which gets back to my mixed feelings. The story in the middle, the days in the life of the people in the world who were dealing – or not – with the moon having turned into cheese, were fantastic and funny and real in all of their human reactions to this insane thing that was happening. But that marvelous middle ends up feeling like a tent without even the flimsiest tentpoles of causality to keep it upright. I enjoyed it as I was reading, but it fell flat to the ground at the end.

So even though I’m a teensy bit disappointed even though my sides still ache from laughing, I would still recommend reading When the Moon Hits Your Eye to anyone who loves the author, a good, needs a good, sustained belly-laugh (and don’t we all these days), or especially a combination of the two.

A- #BookReview: Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite

A- #BookReview: Murder by Memory by Olivia WaiteMurder by Memory (Dorothy Gentleman, #1) by Olivia Waite
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, science fiction, science fiction mystery
Series: Dorothy Gentleman #1
Pages: 112
Published by Tordotcom on March 18, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

A Memory Called Empire meets Miss Marple in this cozy, spaceborne mystery, helmed by a no-nonsense formidable auntie of a detective.
Welcome to the HMS Fairweather, Her Majesty’s most luxurious interstellar passenger liner! Room and board are included, new bodies are graciously provided upon request, and should you desire a rest between lifetimes, your mind shall be most carefully preserved in glass in the Library, shielded from every danger.
Near the topmost deck of an interstellar generation ship, Dorothy Gentleman wakes up in a body that isn’t hers—just as someone else is found murdered. As one of the ship’s detectives, Dorothy usually delights in unraveling the schemes on board the Fairweather, but when she finds that someone is not only killing bodies but purposefully deleting minds from the Library, she realizes something even more sinister is afoot.
Dorothy suspects her misfortune is partly the fault of her feckless nephew Ruthie who, despite his brilliance as a programmer, leaves chaos in his cheerful wake. Or perhaps the sultry yarn store proprietor—and ex-girlfriend of the body Dorothy is currently inhabiting—knows more than she’s letting on. Whatever it is, Dorothy intends to solve this case. Because someone has done the impossible and found a way to make murder on the Fairweather a very permanent state indeed. A mastermind may be at work—and if so, they’ve had three hundred years to perfect their schemes…

My Review:

Some versions of the opening line for the blurb are way, way off. A Memory Called Empire meets Miss Marple is so far off as to be misleading. (The Becky Chambers version of the blurb is somewhat better.) I’m going to do my damndest to correct that misdirection as Murder By Memory is just a terrific cozy mystery that just so happens to be set on a spaceship.

Although that’s misleading too. The HMS Fairweather is more like a space-liner. Or, really, like that cruise line that almost-but-didn’t-quite manage to launch, the one where people were intended to move in and live on the cruise ship as it traveled around the world.

The HMS Fairweather is a lot like that Life at Sea concept, except that it really did launch and its intended journey is for considerably longer than three years. It seems like it’s been traveling for more than three centuries when this story takes place – with no end in sight.

It isn’t a generation ship and it doesn’t seem to have a destination. It’s an endless journey – and an endless life. The passengers do age and eventually die – well, at least their bodies do. Their consciousness gets uploaded and downloaded from one body to another – and life goes on.

The ship is a world unto itself, a surprisingly large and fascinating one. But humans are gonna human, even in the vastness of space, and that’s where Detective Dorothy Gentleman comes in.

Literally, as her sleeping consciousness gets dropped into someone else’s body, in the middle of the ship’s night, while all the passengers and crew – except for Dorothy and this one intrepid and/or intriguing individual who is for some reason out and about while everyone else is tucked away safe and sound in their quarters.

Except, of course, for the other person who is not where they should be, the woman whose sudden death triggered Dorothy’s own return from the sleep between lifetimes. Leaving Dorothy with a job to do and a problem to solve while wondering exactly how unethical it is to borrow someone else’s body after they’ve just used it to commit murder.

Escape Rating A-: This is one of those stories where my one and only complaint is that I really, really, REALLY wish it had been longer. Because what we got was a whole lot of cozy, murderous fun and Dorothy Gentleman is a marvelous take on the lone detective chasing clues and unraveling puzzles in the middle of the long, dark night.

While I wouldn’t have gone within a parsec of the blurb’s description of Marple meets Teixcalaan, I absolutely would describe it as a combination of two books, the SF mystery plot of Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Spare Man combined with the secrets within secrets of life aboard a spacefaring cruise ship of Floating Hotel by Grace Curtis. Not that The Spare Man isn’t also set on a space cruise, but that ship doesn’t have the same vibe that living aboard the ship has in Floating Hotel and Murder by Memory.

So much of A Memory Called Empire is wrapped up in the high-stakes, deeply corruptive, politics of Teixcalaan and its imperial history and ambitions that it just doesn’t feel like any kind of match for Murder by Memory, which is, in spite of the murder, much lighter and frothier. (If the Chambers comparison is to her Wayfarers series and The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, well, that’s somewhere in the virtually towering TBR pile and I haven’t gotten there yet.)

Dorothy Gentleman is good at her job – and it’s fun to watch her work. That she is working from within the body of her primary suspect adds just the right touch of grounding in the SFnal setting to make the whole thing just that much better AND more convoluted at the same time.

Because the solution to this mystery is a grand case of following the money. It’s just that the money that Dorothy is following has been both stolen and hidden in ways that are only possible in SF even though the motive is one of the oldest and most human – greed. While the final piece of evidence is found in the most science fictional way possible.

Dorothy herself starts out as just a touch noir – as she has been unlucky in love and seems determined to conduct her investigation the same way she intends to conduct her life – alone. That she is surprised by both the support of her new and remaining family AND that love might just have found her again made the story end on a high and hopeful note.

I’m looking forward to reading more of Dorothy’s adventures aboard the Fairweather. The setting is already delightful, and more time will just add more delicious layers. Dorothy herself is a fascinating character, someone who has lived a long life and turned her nosy nature to good use. That we’re inside her head for this story, hearing her true – and often wry and witty – thoughts as she works her way through the mystery made the whole thing just that much better and absolutely worth a read.

#BookReview: Chaos by Constance Fay

#BookReview: Chaos by Constance FayChaos (Uncharted Hearts, #3) by Constance Fay
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: science fiction, science fiction romance, space opera
Series: Uncharted Hearts #3
Pages: 344
Published by Bramble Romance on March 11, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Lore Olympus meets Winter's Orbit in this pulse-pounding romance between a space mercenary and a super soldier whose mind-control breaks when she touches him.
He's a mind controlled killing machine, until her touch frees him
Engineer Caro Ogunyemi thinks she has everything in control. Sure, she has a dark secret in her past and aim so bad that she can’t shoot the side of a spaceship when she’s right in front of it, but those are minor details in the life of a space mercenary. When Caro embarks on a solo mission infiltrating a prison planet that is run by the deadly Pierce family, she embraces the opportunity to prove she’s a hero.
It's there that Caro meets Leviathan, a super soldier with a chip in his head that turns him into a mindless killer. He’s drop dead gorgeous with an emphasis on drop dead, until she touches him and renders his chip inert. The danger begins when she lets him go.
In the heart of enemy territory, where love is at stake, life is treacherous and time is short, Caro and Leviathan must figure out how to recover his agency, protect her crew from Pierce’s sinister machinations, and stage a prison-break before Leviathan is lost to her―and himself―forever.

My Review:

First of all, consider the title to be a hint. In fact, consider the individual titles of ALL of the books in the Uncharted Hearts series to be ginormous hints. Just as there were so many calamities in Calamity that the ship was ultimately named for the phenomenon, and the operation in Fiasco turned out to be a complete one of those, so too the ‘rescue mission’ that ace tinkerer Caro is bamboozled/emotionally manipulated into results in complete and utter chaos.

Which does not mean that Caro doesn’t, in the end, get the job done. Because she absolutely does. She just doesn’t get that job done in anything like the way she thought she would. Then again, the job isn’t remotely like what she was sold/told it was, either.

She thinks she’s rescuing two of her crewmates from a job gone wrong. And she does in the end. But they might not have even needed rescuing if she hadn’t concocted a truly lame plan to turn herself in to the rich, rapacious megacorp family that she’s been on the run from for years.

They should welcome her back, right? To pick up her old, truly ethically disgusting chip hacking job right where she left off when she ran away when her gorge rose past her naivete. So, Caro is still more than a bit naive. But she’s a whole lot better at hacking than she used to be.

Or she would be if she could get the tools to work for her – which they suddenly aren’t. Which is where the chaos enters into the picture. When she discovers that her old work has been repurposed to hack the mind of a man who looks like all of her hottest dreams in one gorgeous package, the chaos of the whole situation enters her heart as well.

Now she has more people to rescue than she planned on – and some of them aren’t aware enough to be aware that they need rescuing until Caro and her glitchy ability to glitch whatever she touches glitches them – and for once and always in a really, really, really good way.

Which provides a whole ‘nother avenue for that pesky chaos to enter the picture.

In the end, Caro’s success hinges on the one thing she absolutely never would have counted on in a million years. That the result of one of the terrible ethical lapses she fell into when she was young and dumb coming back, not to haunt her but to help her, in the form of her very own Murderbot.

Escape Rating B+: As Caro herself says, very late in the story, “Comparisons are toxic”. Which is something I wish she’d said a whole lot sooner, as it’s a truth that I REALLY needed to keep in mind while reading this third book in the Uncharted Hearts series.

Because, much as Caro herself did, I couldn’t stop comparing Caro to the protagonists of the previous entries in this series, Temper and Cyn. And Caro kept coming up wanting in my mind – just as much as she did in her own.

At the same time, this was a really compelling read, filled with plenty of the titular chaos, a plot that careened from one high-stakes, high-tension crisis to the next, injected with just the right amount of romance and sexytimes to grease the story into a fast and furious adventure.

But, but, but the plot hinged on Caro’s complete and utterly infuriating obliviousness to the macguffin that was literally just under her skin the whole time. That everything is going to hinge on the weird bugs and their even weirder bites that Caro is exposed to in the opening scenes is so screamingly obvious to the reader and this reader at least wanted to scream at Caro in return until she caught on. Which she eventually did but DAMN that took a frustratingly long time.

Once she does figure out what’s going on and starts to USE both the ‘glitch’ and the prodigious brains she always brings to the table the story kicks into high gear. But I did want to grab her and shake her for quite a while.

Moving right along – just as the story eventually did – there is still a LOT to love in Chaos and in the entire Uncharted Hearts series, starting with an utterly chaotic prison break scene that is straight out of the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie – or at least it is if you swap a combination of the Incredible Hulk and the Winter Soldier for Peter Quinn – which might, come to think of it, have been an upgrade to the movie. (Your intergalactic mileage may vary.)

But seriously, the hulk that Caro calls Levi and gives her heart – as well as her very willing body – to is just the kind of scarred and wounded hero that this series redeems every time – even as he reclaims the better parts of himself and redeems the heroine as well.

On the surface – and after that initial bobble of cluelessness – the story in Chaos is a whole lot of science fiction romance adventure and excitement. But there’s more if you think about it for a bit. The ‘verse of the Uncharted Hearts series is often likened to Firefly, and that’s a description that still very much works three books in.

The thing about the comparison to Firefly that’s definitely held up and flown away with in Uncharted Hearts, is that the ‘verse in Firefly is really, really FUBAR’d, and so is the universe of Uncharted Hearts. The individual entries in this series, at least so far, absolutely show the plucky underdogs of the Calamity poking the evil, rapacious, megacorps in the collective eye with a big sharp stick and getting away with it – for now.

But those megacorps are truly evil examples of the old adage about power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely – and they really do rule their ‘verse. I hope that the crew of the Calamity can somehow manage to acquire a big enough ‘stick’ to poke them all where it will really, really hurt – no matter how unlikely that seems in anything like our reality.

I certainly intend to follow any continuing adventures of Temper and company – and this book absolutely does read as though there will BE more – to find out!