2022 SF/romance, second of a trilogy. Kee Ildez knows that
human-adjacent hottie Varro Runkow isn't interested in her, and anyway
she's got lots of hacking to do to track down the various conspirators
left in the wind…
As with Mihalik's earlier Consortium Rebellion series, each
book deals with a separate romance, and this is the techie's turn.
Mihalik has been a software engineer in real life, so her future
computer security is at least plausible, something I have come not to
expect in SF romances (or indeed SF n general).
The romance convinced me less. She's tried flirting at him; he hasn't
responded; therefore he isn't interested, because he couldn't possibly
have failed to read her signals (though she knows she is bad at
reading signals herself). And the moment they've got past that,
there's Weird Alien Honour because he feels he's broken an oath to
her. Particularly in the context of the same instant mutual attraction
that struck the principals of the first book, it all starts to feel a
bit synthetic, an artificial excuse to postpone the sex scene to the
final chapter.
On the other hand the high-tech action is good, and the bits of
character development that aren't the primary romance work well.
It's lightweight amusement, though, and in spite of some shortcomings
it serves that purpose well.