Top critical review
2.0 out of 5 starsNot much romance, but a pile of questions
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 2, 2021
If you compared any of the first 5 books in this series to this one, you'd probably think they weren't in the same series. And I think that might be right.
MC is talented, and this series is no exception to that. But somewhere during the last few volumes, this series has derailed. What was once a series about a desperate male-dominated culture trying to rebuild through love has become a political/sci-fi/mystery with more loose ends than a bowl of spaghetti.
Spoilers ahead.
This volume presents a hot couple who mostly try to delay sex for odd reasons until they arrive on his home planet. The central "mystery" is the H is that he's a Vorr, an unexplained race with unexplained abilities, who number very few for unexplained reasons, on a dying planet, and you guessed it, for unexplained reasons. The h is some kind of spy called a "nomad," that answers to no one and takes no orders. She showed up a couple of books back with a mission to find out who's killing new settlers and taking over their settlements. Who gave her those orders and why are unexplained. What she was supposed to do eith this intel is never explained. Her backstory is never made clear. At the very end of the book she does finally speak to another nomad who turns out to be the current earth world president. Until now, that character was viewed as a good guy and voice of reason who works honorably with the Lathar emperor. But the weirdly written one page scene between the h and the world prez puts him in a shadowy new light. Wha?????
And this volume continues the trail involving an AI who once was the emperor's twin sister, who pops up now and then. She's pretty much a unicorn device to get main characters out of impossible situations, and may or may not have the answers to all questions ever posed. Whatever.
I didn't feel there was any romance or discovery between the H and the h. They never revealed themselves to one another, even in the epilogue that occurred one year later (a device not used in any other volume in this series). I guess I'm missing the romance on that.
A series can include many kinds of plot devices for sure. But a romance, supposedly at the core of things, should be something other than a throw-off. If MC wanted to write a mystery series, she should have done that outside of this one. I'm not at all clear on what this series is supposed to be now.
