A good story for fans of sci-fi and romance. This is the fourth book in a series and you miss a lot of the backstory if you haven't read the first three, but you can follow this book adequately.

This book is different than Diana's classic cowboys. However, it doesn't take away from the heart and spirit of her writing style. I enjoyed this book and the characters but I'm ready for my cowboys! Thanks Diana for venturing out into a different subgenre. It was a great read

I read the first book in this series, The Morcai Battalion, back in 2007 when the expanded edition was republished by Harlequin Luna. At that time, there wasn’t a lot of outright science fiction romance being published, and The Morcai Battalion filled a need I don’t even think I knew I had.

(Luna was a terrific imprint. I discovered several marvelous authors through their line of SFR and fantasy romance, not just this series but also Michelle Sagara’s Elantra series and Gail Dayton’s Compass Rose, among others, and I wish they were still around.)

Back to The Morcai Battalion. I loved the setting, and the characters, in the original book. Not just the space opera aspects of the intergalactic war, but the relationships between the characters, the culture clash of melding two species into a single crew, and the heart stopping action of the prison planet and eventual breakout. It was a winner and I kept looking for more.

There were a couple of sequels over the years, The Recruit and Invictus. And then nothing from 2010 until now, with The Rescue.

The first three books in the series followed the human doctor, Madeline Ruszel and the alien Cehn-Tahr Dtimun, who begins as her commander and eventually becomes her husband, in spite of all the taboos and restrictions that surround the Cehn-Tahr and any possible relationship between Cehn-Tahr and humans. But the story built their relationship up over time, and it worked. It worked so well that they finally won their HEA at the end of Invictus.

Which leaves either a hole or an opportunity for the series. After reading The Rescue, I’m not quite sure which we got.

The relationship in The Rescue is between Dtimun’s successor as head of the unit, and Madeline’s successor as alien-species medic. But Rhemun is not Dtimun and Edris Mallory is not Madeline. While some of those changes make for good dramatic tension, some of them just fall a bit short.

Because Rhemun hates humans, and Edris frequently acts like a scared rabbit, or perhaps a better description would be a scared schoolgirl with a crush on a strict teacher. And it doesn’t quite work.

Dtimun, Madeline and their crew went through a bonding experience on that prison planet that transcended species or pretty much anything else. They became family in the process of saving each other, and it erased any interspecies prejudices they might have started with.

Rhemun, on the other hand, feels like all of the losses that he has experienced in his life are some human’s fault, and he has an unreasoning prejudice against the entire species. His strict disciplinary style alienates the human members of his crew, which is his intention. He also cuts Edris down at every turn, because she looks just like the woman who accidentally killed his son.

And unfortunately for Edris, his species has a highly enhanced sense of smell, so she is unable to hide her really, really unfortunate attraction for him. And he resents her for that, too.

The situation is a mess, and just gets messier, until Rhemun finally drives Edris off the ship, and very nearly drives every other human out the airlock along with her. It’s when the message finally gets through his very thick skull that he has put her in deadly danger because he can’t help but be attracted to her that their relationship moves from hate to love.

And then he drives her away again.

Escape Rating C+: I enjoyed the first part of the book. While Edris is on the ship, we see her working, we see her continuously fighting with Rhemun, we see her doing her duty as best she can under circumstances that become increasingly more unbearable by the minute. But the action clips along, and we get to see how the ship and crew both work together and don’t. It’s sad but interesting to watch Rhemun tear down a stellar unit that Dtimun spent years building up, and even sadder just how much easier it is to break than it was to build.

But through it all, Edris stands up for herself at every turn, and does her best to do her job, keep her career, and try to keep her life her own and on track. When she flees, while her reasons make sense, the story goes off the rails.

She’s in terrible danger, and it is very real. In the end, Rhemun and the crew have to rescue her to save her life from multiple dangers. And there’s a big portion of the book where she completely loses her agency, going from independent woman to beating victim to worshipful wife in a few too many steps.

And then lets herself be driven away again. Just when she finally has her new life on track, Rhemun swoops back in and tears it all apart again, even if unintentionally. The second half of the book doesn’t quite hang together. As far as the romance is concerned, his side of their relationship isn’t fully fleshed out. It’s easy to see that he wants her and wants to possess her, but we don’t see the build up of his emotions. It feels like that piece is missing.

There’s also a running theme that he omits much of the truth that Edris really needs to know. Lies of omission are still lies, and Rhemun keeps much too much from Edris that ends up biting them both in the ass – but always hers much more than his. And she’s so worshipful that she never calls him to account for any of it. She’s also much too gullible.

So I enjoyed the first half of this book, but found the second half disappointing, and sincerely hope that if the series continues, we get more heroines like Madeline Ruszel who are always part of the action and don’t let anyone steamroller them.

If you like SFR the first three books of this series are a good read, but this one feels skippable. Dammit. And they need to go back to the original cover designs, which at least hinted that this was SFR and not contemporary romance. The new covers make the series look way more like a motorcycle club romance than SFR, which is bound to disappoint people on all sides of the equation. Color me disappointed, too.

This is a re-release of a Diana Palmer novel written under the pen name of Susan Kyle. Originally published in 2007 this is science fiction and fairly different from Ms. Palmer's other series. This series has the humans and the Centuarian race fighting to survive. This is science fiction with romance at it's finest. Book one of the series with what appears to be 4 titles.

I have been waiting for so long for this book to come out and I was thrilled to get an eARC from Netgalley. This book is set after the marriage of Dtimun and Ruszel. Rhemun is now the commander of the Holconcom and he and medical officer Edris Mallory do not get along at all. Mallory still gets nervous about space flight and combat and Rhemun has past tragedies that poison his interactions for Mallory. When she flees after a mistake to avoid going back to TerraVega and being "rebooted", a particularly heinous method of punishment used when humans have had their three strikes in the military. When Rhemun finds her, they are able to realize their true feelings but as usual in their relationship, lack of communication causes problems and things go awry. Rhemun still has some secrets he hasn't disclosed which will throw Mallory for a loop even when they come back together.

I have loved all of the books in this series and this one is a perfect fit. Rhemun and Mallory were always interesting characters in the previous books and it's great to see them featured in this one. I also enjoyed catching up with the other characters from the previous three books. It's a nice mix of paranormal, military and romance which kept me reading straight through to the end without stopping. I enjoy Ms. Palmer's alpha males who can be big boneheads and how they absolutely love the women who love them right back.

This is my first time ever reading this series. I usually don't like sci-fi style books. But this book just proved to me that Diana Palmer is amazing at all types of genre. The main characters are Rhemun an alien commander and Edris a human medical doctor. Get ready to get transported to another world as these two characters fight to be together.

a good read, I liked this book.

Good story, this is first book of this type of story I have read by this author and I really enjoyed it. Some of the names and places were confusing because of unfamiliar names, I also found it confusing the way sometimes the heroine was referred to as Mallory and other times as Edris. But over all a good read.