#25 Star-crossed

By Marilynn Byerly

Teaser:
Earthman Tristan Mallory discovers that on Arden, men are sex slaves. He has no intention of belonging to anyone, not even beautiful Mara d'Jorel.

Mara despises the harem system and has refused to participate, but her heart won't allow anyone else to own Tristan, To give Tristan the freedom her world denies, she must risk everything, her reputation, home, and her freedom and life. Her greatest risk is losing Tristan's love to another woman.

Tristan's friend Kellen is acquired as a bed slave by vicious Cadaran d'Hasta, head of Arden's Internal Security, who has used the lives and deaths of thousands of men to gain her power. Intelligent and amoral, she'll do anything to destroy him and Tristan and any woman weak enough to love them. With the help of a local intelligent alien who resembles an Earth cat and Dorian Dalia, Tristan's long-time romantic interest, Tristan, Mara, and Kellen escape the planet. Through the vast emptiness of space and the most primitive of human colonies, they seek freedom, but Cadaran is always one step behind them.

Review:

This love story had a totally different feel than the last one I read. It's more romance, and darker, with more sex spelled out and some torture to boot. This is a twist on the "planet full of women with hardly any men" theme. Unlike Catherine Asaro in Last Hawk, Ms. Byerly spells out some of the sexual torture until you really see what a sick and twisted person the villain is. Fortunately, that makes up a small part of the book and she does show the ramifications on the poor guy for the rest of the story. PTSD, anyone?

The hero, Tristan, and his friend Kellen, I liked immediately. The heroines took longer to grow on me but I ended up liking them too. I even liked many of the secondary characters.

My favorite character? The Rab-cat, Floppy. He was cool.

This story isn't very fast-paced. The relationships develop realistically over time. There's romance and some action, fights and spaceships, a mystery and a conspiracy, betrayal and revenge, sex and hope.

It was good. I liked it. I won't reread it but I will give the author's other works a read too. And I would revisit the same universe again because the worldbuilding was good.

The bad? The editing was awful. Sorry. Misspelled and missing words. And in my ebook copy Chapter 21 ended in mid-word mid-sentence. "... h-" Nothing.

For me parts of the story were really slow, and then the villain was not "on-screen" for quite a while. I did wonder why the women of the colony didn't figure out the mystery earlier and why it took an alien man to figure out how to talk to the intelligent indigenous species, but not bothered enough to not want to finish reading.

It did have a HEA and a satisfactory ending. The romance was good. The SF was good and didn't dominate the story. Overall I liked it, but not a keeper for me, more of a jumping off point to more of the author's works.