Unfortunately, I don't like Kat and Jerry. They're extremely quick to adopt ultraviolent solutions to their problems, which the author describes with lots of gory details, or to damage a valuable artwork just to provide a distraction, while never suffering any real consequences. Presumably in an attempt to make them less antiheroic, the author <spoiler>














has a sniper kill the named antagonist for them, though they happily, almost gleefully, slaughter lots of nameless mooks.</spoiler>

I think their "banter" is supposed to be both funny and endearing, but I didn't find it either one of those things; I thought it was weak. Their personalities are thin, too, and what there is of them didn't appeal to me. Jerry was born in the 20th century, and is still alive at the age of 250, for reasons that are not fully explained in this book (there are earlier, shorter stories that presumably explain it). Some sort of revival tech that he could afford because he was rich, apparently. This mainly means that he can make pop culture references that we, the readers, recognize. Kat... is some kind of action woman with magic glasses.

The setting is mostly generic 1950s or 1960s-style space opera, complete with sexism that would be less jarring in that time than it is in our own, except, of course, for the computer bits. These are mostly handwaved with some meaningless technobabble, or the word "quantum" used to mean "basically magic, can do anything the plot needs it to." The mining colony explicitly doesn't have a government, and yet in most respects feels like a small town that has a government to put up the decorative street lights and planter boxes, run the Archives and other central amenities, make strict quarantine laws, and provide a police force that is, admittedly, deeply inadequate (drawn from the various mining companies' security staff, supposedly). All of this is happening in orbit around a planet which, at one and the same time, is all the way out at the edge of the galaxy and also one of the first habitable exoplanets to be discovered from Earth, which seems contradictory.

This future of 200 years away is less futuristic than parts of the present, too. There's a lot of physical cash (called, because this is generic mid-20th-century-style space opera, "credits") and paper documents. At one point, a vehicle is left "idling," which is something internal combustion vehicles do and electric vehicles don't. So has some idiot decided it's OK to have internal combustion in a closed atmosphere, or is it just an error by the author?

I hung on to the end only because I do love a heist, and I was promised a heist. It was fairly clever, as heists go, though it did rely on something going exactly right that didn't completely convince me that it would necessarily do that.

The author (or the editor, possibly) has a bad habit of hyphenating a verb and its associated preposition when they are not acting as a compound adjective modifying a noun. In fact, very few of the places a hyphen is used are places that should have a hyphen. Also, when a single sentence is split with a dialog tag, the sentence resumes after the tag with a capital letter, which is incorrect; it's still part of the same sentence, and should be punctuated as such. Since I read a pre-publication version from Netgalley, it is possible that these problems will be fixed before publication, along with some missing or added quotation marks and a few other minor glitches.

Overall, it fell short in execution, and didn't match my taste well either, but it kept me interested enough to finish despite that. For me, that's a three-star book.

I would give the overall story a 4 star rating only because I must give the artwork a rating too!!

The artwork is in black and white on my copy, but I still enjoyed every single frame! Discussing the story, this is very action packed and detailed which I appreciated because I love envisioning a fighting scene. Lastly, I will say that the ending made me happy because I did become worried for a second, seeing as Kat and Jerry worked so hard on their mission. I would read more of their adventures!