Inherit the Stars
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
An epic debut set on the edges of space, where one botched job could mean death—or so much worse…
Wanderlust runs in Kivita Vondir’s blood. She dreamed of salvaging like her father when she was young, and now it’s her addiction, getting her through pit stops filled with cheap alcohol and cheaper companionship and distracting her from her broken heart.
Her latest contract to hunt down a fabled gemstone is exactly the kind of adventure she craves. But this job is more than meets the eye. For one thing, her duplicitous employer has hired rebel Sar Redryll—Kivita’s former lover—to stop her at any cost. For another, Kivita’s recovery of the relic unleashes in her powerful new abilities. Abilities that everyone in the Cetturo Arm—human, alien, and in-between—desperately wishes to control…
As she avoids a massive galactic manhunt, Kivita teams up with two unlikely allies: Sar and his enigmatic new partner. Only, as the gem’s mysteries are revealed and danger draws near, Kivita begins to wonder if her ex has truly changed, or if he’s just waiting for the right moment to betray her once again…
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Debut novelist Peak goes old-school in this slam-bang SF quest novel. Kivita Vondir is a spacefaring salvager who hunts for the technology of the long-lost Vim race. One find triggers interest from the theocratic Inheritors and their alien allies, the Sarrhdtuu. When she's thrown together with Sar Redryll, a smuggler and rebel agent who is hired to jump her claim, they have to navigate the military moves of independent humans, the greed of "the cruelest pirate in the Cerutto Arm," treachery from sidekicks, and the plots within plots of allies who do not trust them or one another. Peak does a good job at creating differentiable characters and cultures through the use of distinct language and speech patterns, and the central will they/won't they romance may remind readers of Princess Leia and Han Solo. But the retro nature of the text sometimes undermines the physics (damaged spaceships "listed to starboard" like sinking ocean liners) and too often pushes the sentiment over into melodrama.