How to Steal a Galaxy (Chaotic Orbits #2) 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 #2
Pages: 144
Published by DAW on December 3, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Sparks fly when Ada and Rian just-so-happen to find themselves at the same charity gala—but there’s something rotten behind the sparkling gowns and dazzling wealth on display

This heist turned rom-com from New York Times bestselling author Beth Revis is perfect for fans of sexy, romantic science fiction and readers of Martha Wells and Becky Chambers

Ada had no intention whatsoever to continue working for the rebel group that hired her to retrieve the government’s plans for a nanobot climate cleaner if they weren’t willing to pay her for it, but then they offer a different perk: an undercover mission to a charity gala where Rian will be in attendance. Rian, meanwhile, has volunteered his services for the gala believing that the rare items up for auction will attract Ada’s eye. Hoping to catch her in the act and pin her with a punishable crime, Rian has no idea Ada’s really after.

In a high-stakes game of theft and deception, Ada plays to win...and Rian will do anything to stop her.

My Review:

In this arresting follow-up to the first book in the Chaotic Orbits trilogy, Full Speed to a Crash Landing, mercenary hacker/thief Ada Lamarr is on the trail of a much more interesting quarry than a mere locked data box. This time she’s not after treasure, she’s after the person who has set himself up as the guardian of a whole, entire museum full of priceless antiquities.

Agent Rian White has his eye on Ada from the moment she arrives at the Museum of Intergalactic History, absolutely certain she’s planning to steal one of the Sol-Earth artifacts no matter how many times she’s says that she’s there for him.

She’s not even lying. She’s certainly toying with the man – but she’s not lying. Not that she wouldn’t like to steal one of the artifacts – and not that she wouldn’t enjoy tweaking the ego of the rich rat bastard who’s the star of this particular charity gala – but she really, truly isn’t there for either of those things.

She really is there for Rian White – for considerably more reasons than she’s willing to admit, even to herself. So all of Rian’s operatives are busy watching her, while she has her eye on her prize all along.

And not that she doesn’t put the dominoes in motion for a couple of secondary prizes along her way.

Ada may not be fooling with White – but someone else already has. Her job – for which she is being paid very good money – – is to remove the scales from White’s eyes and get him to come in on her saving the world caper.

She may be in it for the money, but he’s a true believer. All she has to do is get him to believe – in her.

Escape Rating A-: The caper – and it absolutely is a caper every step of the way – is delightfully frothy, light and sparkling, and filled with witty banter covering plenty of wry undertones and more than a hint of forbidden romance.

Ada is, after all, a thief, and it’s Rian’s job to keep her from stealing anything. But she’s also, in this particular case, the misdirection. He – and his fellow agents – are so busy following Ada that they miss entirely too much of what’s going on around them.

Which is what underpins the whole story of the series – and it’s a doozy once all the sparkling bubbles have popped.

Because White and his fellow agents believe that they are protecting the plan to save a world. This world, in fact. Earth-Sol, the cradle of humanity. They believe that the government that they work for is more-or-less on the side of the angels. That they are doing good while Ada and her employers’ efforts are getting in the way of something both righteous and virtuous.

But that’s not the way the universe works. Especially not when doing good gets in the way of making a really huge, neverending, profit.

The way that this particular story works is that Ada’s seemingly aimless wandering through the Museum Gala is meant to misdirect Rian White, any of his agents, the reader AND the story, all at the same time.

It reads like a bit of light froth, that she’s playing with him, while he’s doing his damndest not to play with her, and that she’s then playing with the scene around her and filling in time while something happens in the background.

And that’s somewhat true and also a bit of a tease for the reader. It makes the story seem much lighter hearted than it really is and keeps White guessing as well. We know Ada is wearing a mask, she even admits as much, but we don’t really see what that mask is in service of.

When she rips it off at the end it’s an ‘aha!’ moment for the reader and an utter shock to White – and that’s when we all get the shape of things to come – or at least we think we do. Ada may have fooled us all again and we won’t learn in exactly what way until the final book in the trilogy, Last Chance to Save the World, coming April. I can’t wait to finally see Ada put all of her cards on the table – and to see if Rian picks them up.

A couple of final notes. Readers who have played Mass Effect may find Ada’s infiltration of the Museum reminiscent of Kasumi Goto’s infiltration of Donovan Hock’s party in Mass Effect 2 – complete with sexy, high-end wardrobe. However, in comparison to Strom Fetor, Hock is fairly penny-ante even if he bears a strong resemblance to a certain real world tech billionaire, amasser of tech companies that he claims to have invented but then destroys, and all around teflon coated, egotistical, arsehole.

Your reading mileage may vary on that bit, but seeing Ada obviously set him up for some comeuppance at a later date did add a bit of just desserts to the impending evil in both worlds that added just an extra fillip of deliciousness to the whole story so far. The ending in Last Chance to Save the World looks like it’s going to be a doozy!

Full Speed to a Crash Landing 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 #1
Pages: 192
Published by DAW on August 6, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A high octane sexy space heist from New York Times-bestselling author Beth Revis, the first in a novella trilogy.
Ada Lamarr may have gotten to the spaceship wreck first, but looter’s rights won’t get her far when she’s got a hole in the side of her ship and her spacesuit is almost out of air. Fortunately for her, help arrives in the form of a government salvage crew—and while they reluctantly rescue her from certain death, they are not pleased to have an unexpected passenger along on their classified mission.
But Ada doesn’t care—all that matters to her is enjoying their fine food and sweet, sweet oxygen—until Rian White, the government agent in charge, starts to suspect that there’s more to Ada than meets the eye. He’s not wrong—but he’s so pretty that Ada is perfectly happy to keep him paying attention to her—at least until she can complete the job she was sent to pull off. But as quick as Ada is, Rian might be quicker—and she may not be entirely sure who’s manipulating who until it’s too late…
A phenomenally fun novella that kicks off a trilogy of sexy space heists and romantic tension, Full Speed to a Crash Landing is packed with great characters and full of twists and turns that will keep you guessing until the end.

My Review:

It’s pretty clear – at least to the reader – from the opening pages of Full Speed to a Crash Landing that Ada Lamarr’s ‘Mayday’ isn’t exactly on the up and up. Even if her little spaceship does have a real, honest-to-larceny hole blown in its side – taking her airlock not merely offline but blown out into little bitsies in the surrounding black of space.

That hole is unequivocally real and true – although every other single thing about Ada’s story sounds like a fake and a lie – even the parts that aren’t either of those things. The government agent in charge of the Halifax, the much bigger and better funded ship that has dawdled to her rescue is certain that Ada has got something going on on the down low that necessitated her ship’s presence in this particular sector in orbit over this particular tectonically active (extremely active) baby planet.

He’s sure that both Ada and his ship are after the same quarry, the cargo ship that crash landed, very badly and in multiple pieces, on that earthquake-ridden and volcano prone little planetoid.

Agent Rian White knows what his crew is after, but he’s less than certain about Ada’s stake in this particular game. Only that he’s absolutely positive that she has one.

But he’s so bewitched, bothered and bewildered by the seemingly open but utterly devious smuggler that he doesn’t figure out that she’s already stolen everything she planned on until after she warps away with the contents of a much-sought-after and destructively secured datadrive, the key to opening it – and, quite possibly, his heart.

Unfortunately for Ada, she’s all too aware that he has hers – and that it’s the one thing she never expected to lose – let alone to a government agent who is too good and too good-looking for his own – or certainly her own – good.

Escape Rating A-: This one is pure, sheer, unadulterated fun. It just hits on so many levels in a way that keeps both the reader and the characters delightfully guessing every step of the way. Because we know from the beginning that Ada Lamarr is, as that old saying goes, no better than she ought to be. We know she’s an unreliable narrator because she teases us – along with government agent Rian White, with her secrets and plans and wheels-within-wheels plot even as she’s running out of oxygen and wondering if perhaps she went just a bit too far with her opening gambit.

At least until it works – and gives her one up on the stick up her ass captain of the Halifax. Who is NOT really in charge and is absolutely not Rian White – whose ass is delectable and absolutely does not have a stick up it. (And I’ll leave the rest of the possible salacious jokes and puns right here no matter how tempting they are. Ada has several thoughts in that direction but absolutely does not go there in this first book in the Chaotic Orbits trilogy – no matter how much she wants to.)

On the surface, this is very much a wheels-within-wheels long game kind of caper plot. Ada clearly has a hidden agenda from the off – even if she doesn’t reveal the full extent of it even inside the privacy of her own head. Rian sees the wheels spinning, even if he can’t see what they’re spinning around and about, Ada sees his wheels spinning and is attracted by his obvious intelligence. They’re both clearly playing with each other on multiple levels and that’s already fun.

Which gives the story a bit of lightness that brightens the world creation – because it’s equally clear that the way this particular SF world is set up is not all that light. And it’s a bit murky, at least at this early stage, whether Ada is on the side of the angels or on the side of the biggest paycheck. She’s undoubtedly morally gray, but one of the questions that we’re left with at the end is whether Rian White is even grayer, or not.

That the grayness revolves around a very interesting question adds a bit of depth to that world creation. Because this isn’t a case where the established government is evil in one way or another, the question is whether or not it can possibly be effective at fixing what’s been broken. Not a question of whether or not it’s on the side of the angels, but whether or not it has enough angels on its side to get the shit that needs to get done, done.

Between the caper aspects, the questions about which side is the righteous one in a universe going mad, and the possibility of romance – or at least eventual sexytimes – between its deceitful heroine and its play-mostly-by-the-rules hero, Full Speed to a Crash Landing fits right into the marvelous moment that science fiction romance is currently having.

So if you’ve fallen hard for Valerie Valdes’ Chilling Effect, Rachel Bach’s Fortune’s Pawn, Cat Rambo’s You Sexy Thing and/or Constance Fay’s marvelous Fiasco and Calamity, you’ll be as pleased as I am to know that the second book in the Chaotic Orbits trilogy, How to Steal a Galaxy, will be speeding our way in December. Rian White will be staking out an auction hoping it will attract Ada – while Ada plans to convince him to join her on the dark side – where the cookies are – by kidnapping him into her own questionably legal plans.

It should be a BLAST!