After saving the heir to the Valovian empire, the crew of the Starlight Shadow is now on the hunt for the man who betrayed them during the war, Frank Morten. Kee Ildez, the computer expert aboard the Starlight Shadow, decides to hack her way into the space station communications in order to locate him. If she can get her mind off of Varro Runkow, one of the Valovians who recently joined their crew, that would be even better. Unfortunately for Kee, Varro follows her to the space station in order to protect her from danger.
This is the second book in the Starlight’s Shadow series and focuses on Kee, the ship’s hacker, and Varro, the weapons expert. You do need to read the first book in the series, Hunt the Stars, to understand what is going on. The author doesn’t do a huge info dump about what happened in the first book, so I had to kind of remind myself of those events. But the author definitely assumes that you know who everyone is and you know what happened in the first book so you shouldn’t read these books out of order.
I didn’t like this book as much as the first one. I think it’s because I didn’t find Kee and Varro to be the most exciting characters. A lot of Kee’s time is spent hacking databases and searching for information which was a little boring to read about; there wasn’t much action. Additionally, Kee and Varro are put into this forced proximity plotline that didn’t really pay off for me. I felt like their romance wasn’t especially developed and I think part of that is because the book is told from Kee’s point of view so we never get to hear or know what Varro is thinking. We only see his “grumpy” attitude.
I also really missed the team/crew dynamic that was established in the first book. One of the things I liked about Hunt the Stars was reading about the crew as a whole interacting with each other and with the other Valovians and I felt like we didn’t get a lot of that here. It seemed like the first book really focuses on the found family aspect and that was missing in this book.
The plot from Hunt the Stars is forwarded on a bit. The crew is still trying to figure out who was behind the kidnapping from the first book and who they can trust. More characters are introduced and I don’t know if they will show up in subsequent books. More questions are raised that hopefully, we will find out the answers to soon.
The next book in the series focuses on two characters we briefly met in the first book so I’m looking forward to see what happens there.
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