Grimspace by Ann Aguirre

As the carrier of a rare gene, Sirantha Jax has the ability to jump ships through grimspace-a talent which makes her a highly prized navigator for the Corp. Then a crash landing kills everyone on board, leaving Jax in a jail cell with no memory of the crash. But her fun's not over. A group of rogue fighters frees her...for a price: her help in overthrowing the established order.

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**Warning: Contains Mild Spoilers**

This book grabs ahold of you almost from the beginning, drags you into the story, and then hardly ever lets you go. There is action almost from page one, and only brief respites where the characters get downtime since the author doesn't spend a lot of time telling us about what they did day by day during a 3 week space trip, for instance, but keeps the momentum going by simply summarizing such lulls and then getting right back to the action. Jax's voice as the first person narrator is often quirky, sometimes snarky, and overall helps to both get you involved with what's happening on a more personal level, as well as doing more to hint at and illustrate Jax's frequent mental instability than if the author were simply to tell us about her mental issues. Instead you get to see them first hand by looking through Jax's eyes and hearing her often depressed, depressing, and frequently paranoid internal monologues.

Gabriel's Ghost by Linnea Sinclair

After a decade of piloting interstellar patrol ships, former captain Chasidah Bergren, onetime pride of the Sixth Fleet, finds herself court-martialed for a crime she didn’t commit–and shipped off to a remote prison planet from which no one ever escapes. But when she kills a brutal guard in an act of self-defense, someone even more dangerous emerges from the shadows.

Gabriel Sullivan–alpha mercenary, smuggler, and rogue–is supposed to be dead. Yet now this seductive ghost from Chaz’s past is offering her a ticket to freedom–for a price. Someone in the Empire is secretly breeding jukors: vicious and uncontrollable killing machines that have long been outlawed. Gabriel needs Chaz to help him stop the practice before it decimates Imperial space. The mission means putting their lives on the line–but the tensions that heat up between them may be the riskiest part of all.



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**May contain mild spoilers**

I had mixed reactions to this book. On the one hand, the romance between Chaz and Sully that takes up most of the first 2/3 of the book (and a fair bit of the last 1/3) was really annoying in many ways. On the other, the bigger story that only really came out, or started to come out, in the last 1/3 of the book proved to be interesting and promising for the future books of the series. It's a shame really that it got so eclipsed by the disfunctional romance story for so much of this volume.

The Iron Duke by Meljean Brook

After the Iron Duke freed England from Horde control, he instantly became a national hero. Now Rhys Trahaearn has built a merchant empire on the power - and fear - of his name. And when a dead body is dropped from an airship onto his doorstep, bringing Detective Inspector Mina Wentworth into his dangerous world, he intends to make her his next possession.

But when Mina uncovers the victim's identity, she stumbles upon a conspiracy that threatens the lives of everyone in England. To save them, Mina and Rhys must race across zombie-infested wastelands and treacherous oceans-and Mina discovers the danger is not only to her countrymen, as she finds herself tempted to give up everything to the Iron Duke.





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This book has shown me why I've avoided steampunk settings before, for I find the whole thing very bizarre as my brain refuses to reconcile an advanced tech like nanoagents inside a body with an 1800s-ish time period (though some of the clockwork devices described in this book are most definitely very intriguing...). That said, I found this to be a very enjoyable read with compelling characters that I couldn't help getting wrapped up with. Many things about this world might have been rather too strange for my tastes, but the characters were very easy to identify with, and the situations they found themselves in were, on the whole, fairly believable.

Mastering Marissa by Cyna Kade

Mastering Marissa by Cyna Kade
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A powerful story that takes the reader on an emotional roller coaster. The author does a wonderful job of pulling you into the story to the point that you can feel Marissa's anger, fear, and frustration as she tries to come to grips with the customs and culture of Darinth. It seems almost excessively cruel in some ways the way that Kytar tricks her first into accepting him as an escort, which leads to him binding her, and then into accepting his collar, withholding key information from her all along so that she acts without really understanding what she's agreeing to or what the consequences will be. It is true, however, that she refuses to believe him when he does try to explain things to her, so perhaps his deceptions are a bit more forgivable.

On the negative side, Marissa ends up turning the corner from defiance to submission fairly suddenly and unexpectedly, her change of heart coming a bit sooner than one would have expected. By that point, however, things had reached the stage where something had to give one way or another - either she had to decide to stop fighting so hard and work to accept and submit, or there was a very real chance that the training would have ended up breaking her. Still, things could have gone on just a bit longer, and the change of heart could have happened a little more gradually so that it wasn't quite as jarring to the flow that had been established. The author's skill at bringing the emotions of the situation alive so vividly well overcomes these few negatives, however, and the story deserves the full five stars as being one of the best in it's class.

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