Chilling Effect
The Chilling Effect series, Book 1
Valerie Valdes
Harper Voyager
Fiction, Humor/Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: Eva Innocente never set out to be an amoral smuggler with a seedy reputation, some of it even true. She just wanted to escape a boring planetbound life and see the universe, and one thing led to another. Even she has lines she doesn't like crossing, though, which is why she left her father Pete and her old boss Tito to strike out on her own aboard La Sirena Negra with an oddball crew... and why she was stuck ferrying a load of psychic cats for a buyer who disappeared at the other end of the deal, leaving her holding the furry, purring bag.
Just when she thought figuring out what to do with her worthless cargo would be her biggest headache, she gets a message from The Fridge, an organization so shady she thought they were just an intergalactic rumor. They've abducted her sister Marie, an innocent archaeologist exploring ancient alien ruins, and will hold her in cryonic storage unless Eva works for them. If she tells anyone, even her crew, her sister dies. Eva has no choice but to comply, but The Fridge has picked the wrong captain to push around. She may not be close to her family anymore, but she's not about to let anyone mess with them or her crew - and one thing her reputation has right about Captain Eva Innocente is that she makes a terrible enemy.
REVIEW: It looked fun, a deliberate poke at space opera tropes with a spitfire heroine and a universe full of aliens and ancient artifacts and adventure. I kept waiting for it to actually rise above those tropes, unfortunately, but nobody and nothing ever does. Eva, her crew and her enemies, and pretty much everyone she meets and everything she encounters feel very off-the-rack, even the hit-and-miss humor, her personal transformation from selfish and jaded wash-up to slightly-less-selfish and still-jaded heroine slow and expected. But, then, her whole family's selfish and jaded in their own ways, making her loyalty to them one of the many borderline-unbelievable things in the book.
Oh, things do happen, and there are numerous potentially intriguing ideas and incidents. Eva's impatience and temper and tendency to lie, use others, and push people away get everyone into all sorts of trouble (with a phenomenally high body count, which she sorta feels bad about, but not really bad enough to slow down and think next time). An early brush-off of an oversexed alien emperor leads to a running threat when the guy turns his empire's entire resources and firepower to (inexplicably and plot-conveniently) tracking her across the galaxy, even to top-secret bases entirely off the grid, to destroy everyone and everything stopping him from turning her into a prize trophy in his harem (a play on female objectification/reduction to sex objects that never goes anywhere or provides anything like a payoff), obvious betrayals play out obviously, and eventually it ends without following through on numerous elements or really delivering on its many promises, like a pilot episode whose primary purpose is setting up a series rather than providing a satisfying story arc on its own.
By the halfway point, I was just listening because I didn't feel like poking through Overdrive to find something else to kill time at work; I'd already mostly guessed that the story was about as lightweight as it seemed, the characters no deeper than the paper their print versions would've been printed on, the story a whole lot of to-do over ultimately nothing. (I'll admit I mostly kept listening because I was sure - absolutely positive - that Valdes wouldn't have gone out of her way to open with a ship overrun with twenty psychic cats of unknown true intelligence or power without having them become an actual, integral plot point, perhaps a spacefaring version of the classic Dick Whittington's cat, or a complication setting up a climax, or... something. I don't consider it much of a spoiler to tell you that, no, they do not. The cats could've been self-sealing stem bolts for all that they ultimately impact anything.) Maybe things pick up in the second volume, but nothing I heard here made me interested enough to find out any time soon.
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