Chilling Effect
The Chilling Effect series, Book 1
Valerie Valdes
Harper Voyager
Fiction, Humor/Sci-Fi
Themes: Aliens, Cross-Genre, Diversity, Felines, Girl Power, Thieves, Space Stories
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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 it never 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.