A sexy series shakes things up in its eighth installment.
A human woman who feels like an outsider finds love with an exiled alien.
Maddie and her sister, Lila, were kidnapped from Earth and crash-landed on an ice planet. Lila is deaf, and Maddie has spent most of her life in the role of Lila’s protector. But now Lila is happily mated with a baby on the way, and Maddie is struggling to forge her own identity separate from her sister. Maddie is the last unmated human woman on the ice planet. She’s convinced it’s because she’s temperamental and difficult, and she feels a lot of self-loathing about her body, which she thinks is “fat” compared to the other women. Bored and lonely, Maddie decides to teach herself to hunt. Impressed by her strength and determination, Hassen, one of the clan’s hunters, offers to teach her hunting and trapping skills. She’s curious about Hassen, who is alone, having lost his entire family when a sickness swept through his clan. In Barbarian’s Touch (2024), the previous book in the series, Hassen kidnapped Lila, hoping to find a mate. As punishment, he has been outcast, but he continues to hunt on behalf of the clan, hoping to show that he’s worthy of being readmitted. He regrets that his loneliness and longing for a family prompted him to take such a rash action. Maddie is intrigued by Hassen, recognizing a fellow outcast when she sees one. She offers a friends-with-benefits arrangement, and the two enter into a passionate affair. Hassen hopes Maddie will eventually consider him as a permanent mate. Dixon shows how her characters’ arcs mirror each other, with both longing for acceptance and belonging. Maddie realizes her strengths add value to the tribe, while Hassen longs to be forgiven for his selfish kidnapping. There is very little conflict between the two, as the difficulties of actual survival on an ice planet trump minor emotional conflicts. When a huge earthquake throws the entire society into crisis, Maddie and Hassen prove their worth by going to extraordinary lengths to save the others.
A sexy series shakes things up in its eighth installment.Pub Date: May 28, 2024
ISBN: 9780593639481
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A cleverly titled, cozy SF romance that marks Thorne as a writer to watch.
After purchasing a dilapidated, century-old starship called the Destitute, Torian Razner discovers that the moss covering it is, in fact, a deeply sarcastic sentient computer with abandonment issues.
Torian’s sister, Celise, is dying. Determined to save her life by getting her to a distant planet with air she can breathe, Torian ignores her former captain Amelia Perrosk’s warning that it’s an impossible task (along with any romantic feelings she might have for Amelia). Using the only ionite bars she has to her name, Torian purchases an ancient, moss-covered alien starship that appears to be on its last legs, so to speak. She hardly expected the moss to be a sentient computer or for it to hold a century-old grudge against its former alien captain. Moss quickly proves itself to be acerbic, intelligent, and rightly angry after being having been left behind for 100 years by its former captain. The two form a reluctant and surprising alliance, Torian proving to Moss that not all captains are “dog-turd fungus,” and they both gradually evolve into the best versions of themselves, human or otherwise. It’s obvious from the early pages that Thorne has crafted a story tailored to fans of Becky Chambers’ Monk & Robot series and Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries. Falling somewhere between the two, this is a delightful mashup of romance, found family, and a touch of violence as Moss grapples with its feelings about its former captain and the unexpected kindness that Torian shows. Sweet without being overly saccharine, it’s a book for readers who want the adventure that comes with the vastness of outer space without its harsher realities.
A cleverly titled, cozy SF romance that marks Thorne as a writer to watch.Pub Date: July 7, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414144
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bramble Books
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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