Captain Tess Bailey and her crew of Robin Hood-like thieves are desperate and on the run. Pursued by a vicious military general who wants them dead or alive, Tess has to decide if she can trust Shade Ganavan, a tall, dark and arrogant stranger with ambiguous motivations.
Shade Ganavan had oodles of arrogance, oodles of charm, and oodles of something that made me want to kick him in the nuts.
What Tess and Shade don’t know about each other might get them killed… unless they can set aside their differences and learn to trust each other – while ignoring their off-the-charts chemistry.
Shade swallowed the bad taste in his mouth. Two hundred million. He could buy back his birthright and live like a king forever on that.
Captain T. Bailey.
Beautiful. Ballsy. And Brave.
A wanted criminal.
Indecision clawed at his chest. He knew where she was.
The easiest nab and grab of his life was waiting for him. He could land two hundred million in his account. Double that if she still had the goods.
I have this habit of not reading the blurbs before I actually start reading a book I requested ages ago. So I went into this not quite knowing what to expect. And I was pleasantly surprised.
I enjoyed the heck out of this book while I was reading. Tess is an easy character to root for. At one point a character in the book said to her that she gives respect, and she should not be surprised when she receives it back. I think that’s the thing I like most about her. Even though she has strong reason not to trust, she continues to live life. Fully. She doesn’t hide in the shadows, she plows ahead. Doing the next right thing. And even if it means she may get hurt.
Which isn’t to say that she doesn’t do things that she later regrets. Because I don’t think anyone gets through life without regrets, but she doesn’t let it debilitate her.
Tess and her team remind me a lot of Robin Hood, but even more of Firefly. I love Firefly. It was a show that was cut too short, far too quickly. If there’s one place that Nightchaser doesn’t live up to Firefly, it’s in the secondary characters characterization. We get to know them, but they’re still mostly periphery. I’d have appreciated more.
We did, however, get to know quite a lot about Shade. Which makes sense. I really like Shade. I liked, even more, his dilemma. Though I did text Sarah and say, “he better not take the bounty.” I understood his hesitancy and why it was so hard to choose. I appreciated the place he was in, and that he had hard choices in front of him.
Hard choices, is a theme in this book. It’s proven over and over again that sometimes there is no good choice, and you just do the next best thing that can be done. Sometimes that’s a shit option, that has the potential to hurt people. Sometimes any choice is going to lead to a lot of pain and death. Tess makes these choices. And they hurt, her most of all.
It’s not often that a book can surprise the hell out of me. And I should have really seen these things coming, but there were at least two that made my eyes widen because I didn’t expect it. And then I immediately texted Sarah, who just got done re-reading this book, while I’m reading it for the first time.
I’m definitely looking forward to Starbreaker, due out on Tuesday, the 28th of April. I can’t wait to see what’s in store for these characters. I imagine there’s going to be more bad before we get to the good – but I hope they can find some good along the way, too.
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