2022 SF/romance novelette, prequel to a trilogy. Captain Octavia
Zarola is a bounty hunter with a heart of gold.
It's pleasing to see an acknowledgement in this
practically-mainstream SF-romance that, if you're a bounty hunter in a
setting where people can post private bounties, a lot of the people
with the money to post those bounties won't be very nice. But
Octavia's big problem is that she has morals, so she keeps on not
taking jobs, or (as here) deciding that the target deserves a better
outcome. And spaceships are expensive to keep running.
But that's not really what she's here for; the bounty hunting is an
excuse to provide a home for the survivors of her squad from the war,
abandoned by their own leadership. (Well, most of them; one has fewer
morals and is off somewhere else bounty-hunting in her own right.) As
we see them here, they're all basically good guys and only mildly
post-traumatic.
As in Mihalik's Consortium Rebellion series, the worldbuilding is
fairly light: it wouldn't be confusing for anyone who's seen Firefly
or similar shows, and it's not really meant to provide more than a
backdrop for the character story. It's not egregiously bad, just very
familiar and not particularly showing signs of having been thought
through.
This is meant to introduce you to the characters and get you
interested so that you read the novels. For that, it works.
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