2000 romance/SF/mystery; first of a series. After an unfortunate
incident in an alien tomb, Lydia Smith is finding it hard to get work.
So she can't afford to turn down the one client who's willing to
employ her, even if he clearly isn't telling her everything…
I'm very much reminded of the In Death series (which had
started in 1995): both Nora Roberts and Jayne Ann Krentz were already
successful mainstream romance writers who chose to use pseudonyms for
their series set away from the real world, and neither of them really
seems interested in SF world-building except insofar as it serves the
plot and the romance. Yeah, you can call a car a Slider but you still
have to park it, and you can slap "res-" on the front of every gadget
name but it still works the same way.
Which to me is a bit of a shame because there's an interesting setup
here: the world of Harmony was colonised through an interstellar gate
and people mostly arrived with what they could carry. At some point
the gate closed, and they lost their technology base and had to
reinvent everything with local materials, particularly the resonant
amber that mostly seems to be found in ancient alien tombs. Humans got
psychic powers too, and it turns out that what you really need to get
stuff done is both a para-archaeologist to deal with the psychic traps
and a ghost hunter to deal with the ghosts. Pity they can't get on…
Lots of things aren't explained in much detail, but that's fine; the
real story is about Lydia, who messed up with a trap (or was she
pushed into it?), which ended her academic career; and Emmett, who's
looking for a stolen artefact, or at least that's his story. Of course
there's much more to it than that, but he has good reason not to trust
her with all the details.
There is smouldering, and almost-but-not-quite sex, and flying off the
handle; maybe this relationship will last, maybe not, but it won't be
dull for them or for anyone within earshot. It's all a bit slow-paced,
but the characterisation was enough to carry me through even as the
plot switched from relic hunting to noir corruption and a little bit
back.
Lydia has a pet alien cat-analogue. It's that kind of book.