Wednesday, May 6, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Prime Deceptions by Valerie Valdes



Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on September 8, 2020 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.



Prime Deceptions is the sequel to Valerie Valdes' first novel, her space opera "Chilling Effect," which I reviewed here on this blog.  In retrospect, I didn't grade Chilling Effect highly enough - it was a tremendously fun space opera novel with a setting clearly inspired by a number of more well known properties (particularly Mass Effect) that featured a great lead heroine to go along with a solid cast of characters and again, it was simply a really fun read.  Basically think of it as the start of a more comic version of Mass Effect - except with plenty of references to other geeky materials - and it worked really well as such.  So I couldn't wait to get my hands on the sequel - and thanks to an eARC being offered on NetGalley, I actually got my hands on it early.

Prime Deceptions is just as fun as its predecessor - and maybe a bit more so.  As with any second novel, the setting expands to cover new people and places and this allows for more fun adventures with our heroine and her crew - and the action scenes and character development are great.  Most importantly is that it's still really funny at times, even as it never gets full on into parody at any given point.  Valdes seems to go more over the top with geeky references (it's also possible I just was more familiar with these ones than the ones in the last book) but if you don't get them you'll hardly miss anything - you don't need to get any of them to enjoy the plot, the characters, the jokes or anything.  And I suspect most will enjoy them, as it's just all so damn good.

Note: Minor Spoiler for a plot twist in the first book is below, but it's not really anything that will ruin your enjoyment of the first book if you know about it in advance.  Still, read the first book before this one - it's too good to skip.

-----------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
Captain Eva Innocente and her crew - Co-Captain and Medic Pink, Special Agent and Engineer (and romantic partner) Vakar, Engineer Sue, and Pilot Min - have spent the last six months jaunting around the galaxy taking jobs that would put them in conflict with The Fridge, the intergalactic crime syndicate that tried to extort Eva last year.  But after another successful mission, Eva is contacted by her sister Mari with an offer of employment on a mission for Mari's secretive employers - an organization opposed to the Fridge.  Of course, the last time Eva had to deal with Mari and her employers, Eva had been constantly lied to, extorted, kidnapped, frozen, and left for dead, so neither she nor the rest of the crew is particularly excited to hear Mari out.

But Mari's offered mission is one that is impossible for Eva to resist: to help find and rescue Sue's engineer brother Josh - who was supposedly captured by the Fridge for ransom and never seen since.  Sue has been looking for him for years, even breaking into banks to get the money for his ransom, and Eva has always been hoping to find him herself for her engineer.

But Josh's trail will lead Eva back to the planet where her greatest shame took place - the incident that forced her to change her name and leave her criminal father behind, one which she has kept secret from everyone but Pink all this time.  For you can only outrun your past for so long, and for Eva Innocente, her dark secrets once changed the whole galaxy, and will threaten to swallow up all those she cares about one final time....
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So yeah, despite the above description, this is in NO way a dark space opera novel - even with the dark things that some of our characters may have done in the past.  Like its predecessor, Prime Deceptions leans on the comic side of the scale - this is book about some fun characters getting into dangerous situations, and seeing how they get themselves out - often in comic fashion.  It's not a Hitchhiker's Guide-esque novel where a million jokes a minute are more important than plot, but its a story not afraid to pile up jokes - often lowbrow ones - as the real plot moves along, and the book is all the more fun for it.  What I'm trying to say is this is a book that will make you smile practically every chapter with delight, even though you know that's what it's trying to do.

It helps that the cast is really damn fun here, and the plot gives them all ways to shine, even if the story is still mainly focused upon Eva particularly.  Eva's habit of reckless activity in the sake of her goals - particularly when it will result in her getting to hit those she dislikes - makes her a damn fun character, even as this book throws at her a moral quandary from her tragic past.  Add her interactions with everyone else - the antagonist, her mother, the crew, and it's so easy to love her and root for her - especially because the book has her clearly learning from her prior errors and not simply repeating them over and over.

Then you have Sue the young woman engineer in control of her mass of tiny repair bots who is desperate to find her brother, who takes far more of a center stage role this time, and Min, the other young woman on the crew who hooks herself in to the ship as a pilot, but this time gets background depth.  The latter leads to a brilliant 3 v 3 robot/armored suit combat contest which is an absurdly fun highlight of this novel, but far from the only one.  Vakar and Pink as the rest of the crew get more subdued roles this time around - mainly because Vakar and Eva's romantic relationship is still strong and open at this point, so there's less to do there other than to see Vakar try to ensure he isn't called away by duty from Eva.  Oh and I shouldn't forget the psychic cats.

And this cast, plus the secondary characters, leads to a plot that is a roller coaster ride of fun adventures of many many different types.  Without spoiling, our initial ride takes us to three very fun planets dealing with 3 different types of fun activities that are takes on those on our own world and full of great humor as a result.  And then we get to the main planet for this story, as our heroes attempt to avoid Eva's notoriety and solve their mission on a planet which again is on the verge of civil war, and has to deal with a number of opinionated minor characters as a result - including Eva's mother, who honestly was another highlight for me: she's stridently law-abiding and actually works for the galactic government (initialed BOFA because this is that kind of book), and is very much the caring but a bit overbearing mother you might find in your own family...except perhaps not in the end (I love her).  All of this cast and the plot leads us on a fun ride that takes a bunch of unpredictable but well set up twists and turns up through its satisfying ending. 

I should add here that this book is chock full of geeky references - quite a few of which I got and made me smile even more.  And I mean chock full - the very dedication is a reference, as are quite a few chapter titles, and presumably I missed a whole bunch of such references as I realize I only got one after the fact due to the author giving hints on twitter.  Still, the book's humor and characters are not dependent upon the reader getting the references at all and the book doesn't try to hit the reader over the head with these references - Ready Player One this is not.  The references add to your enjoyment if you get them, but if you don't, there's little harm here.

In short, Prime Deceptions is tremendous fun and I'm absolutely not giving it enough credit in this review, because it's hard to explain WHY something is "fun" - but this absolutely is.  I needed a book that would make me smile so I read it 5 months early in place of other books scheduled to come out sooner, and I do not regret that choice one bit.  Recommended Highly.
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