2020 SF/romance, last of a trilogy. Catarina von Hasenberg, the
youngest of the heirs to one of the three Great Houses, has a public
persona as a partying idiot… and some of the time even she believes
it. But she'll still go undercover at a rival House's summer retreat
to try to get proof relating to the kidnapping of her brother.
…and just as in book 2, there's a chap whose responsibility is
her safety, and they will be thrown together, but she won't want to
reveal her secret superpower…
It's a bit of a rerun at times. And I really don't see why, if you
were a head of government doing illegal supersoldier research, you'd
use your infant daughter as a test subject (even an expendable
youngest infant daughter) rather than someone whom you could quietly
disappear with nobody asking where they'd gone. But hey ho, she has to
have a Big Secret, so that's the setup.
On the other hand, the relationships have definitely got better
through the series: Cat is first of all reluctant to take the help for
a mission she'd planned to do pretty much solo, because she's used to
working alone and she's insecure about her family perceiving her
useless-fop image as the reality. She and Alex make peace about that,
and then she doesn't want to indulge in the hots she's got for him
because it would complicate the mission, which is fair enough… and
they talk about it, my goodness, rather than just assuming "his
eyebrow was 0.3mm too low he must hate me woe is me", they actually
have sensible adult conversations! Hurrah!
(OK, so this does mean that their early sex scenes have to get
"comically" interrupted, but you know, there's stuff happening.)
There's an outside plot as well: that kidnapping was only one step in
a much larger plot, and Cat ends up being instrumental in resolving
what could have been a long and nasty civil war. And it all makes
sense for who she is; she doesn't grow new superpowers, she sorts
this stuff out by talking with people and building a consensus and
only then using the minimum necessary force (she has very little force
to apply, after all). I don't expect a lot of sophistication in my SF
romances but there's actual sense talked here, in terms of both how
things got this way and how they'll be changed in the future. It's no
utopia, but it is a happy ending.
As before one could easily enter the series here; the characters from
the previous books are occasionally about in the background, but this
is Cat's and Alex's story, and it's not hard to pick up what's going
on.
If you are in the mood for an SF romance series, you could do a whole
lot worse than this.
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