Open Skies
-
- $4.99
-
- $4.99
Publisher Description
After seven years working as partners, Kai and Ilsa are the best professional finders in the business. There's nothing they can't track down, no matter how unfamiliar the star system or hazardous the path. When a new client insists on accompanying the search for his daughter, Ilsa and Kai reluctantly agree. How can they refuse when Eleazar Dantes is desperate enough to pay double their usual fee?
But a high-stakes investigation is no time for distractions. Even more troublesome, when Kai realizes his true feelings for Ilsa, his timing couldn't be worse. Never mind that she doesn't seem to reciprocate: heartbreak is the least of their problems as the trail they're following grows dangerous.
With every step forward, Kai and Ilsa are more certain they won't find Eleazar's missing daughter alive.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kleinn's story is stretched too thin between ideas; it doesn't know whether it wants to be a near-future space adventure or a romantic story, and it ends up being neither. When "professional finders" Ilsa Vance and Kai Othen take on Eleazar Dantes as a client, they have every reason to distrust him. Eleazar is a war profiteer trying to find his daughter, lost during the interstellar war against the alien Enriu. While in peril during the search, Kai confesses that he's fallen in love with Ilsa. The investigative plot is hardly compelling, and the prose is overwritten and tedious. Ilsa's unhappy response to Kai's declaration of love is understandable; she's long since wearied of explaining to suitors that she doesn't want either sex or romance with anyone, ever, and Kai callously demands that she explain and justify her nature. But her immediate 180-degree turn from close partnership to furious, implacable distrust renders her unsympathetic. Without a compelling direction, the story is too flimsy, and the characters never develop. Lacking the passion of adventure or the warmth of human connection, Ilsa and Kai's eventual reunion which heaps on the romantic fiction clich s ("She had to let him back in completely or let him go forever") despite Ilsa's professed lack of interest in romance feels unearned and unrealistic. Readers eager for asexual and aromantic representation in fiction will be disappointed by this weak effort.
