Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes

I would like to thank Nazia and Orbit for a copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher - Orbit

Published - Out Now

Price - £8.99 paperback £3.99 Kindle eBook

Captain Eva Innocente and the crew of La Sirena Negracruise the galaxy delivering small cargo for even smaller profits. When her sister is kidnapped, Eva must undergo a series of dangerous missions to pay the ransom. But Eva may lose her mind before she can raise the money. The ship's hold is full of psychic cats, an amorous fish-faced emperor wants her dead, and her engineer is giving her a pesky case of feelings. The worse things get, the more she lies, raising suspicions and testing her loyalty to her found family.

To free her sister, Eva will risk everything: her crew, her ship, and the life she's built on the ashes of her past misdeeds. But when the dominoes start to fall and she finds the real threat is greater than she imagined, she must decide whether to play it cool or burn it all down.

I think science fiction is in an interesting place at the moment - certain approaches are getting stale and with new voices like Becky Chambers, Arkady Martine and Tade Thompson the genre is is being pushed into a different direction. This makes books coming out now in an interesting place of standing between old and new worlds. Reading Valerie Valdes’ charming Chilling Effect I found a promising start to a new series but one where I enjoyed some aspects more than others.

We meet Captain Eva Innocente trying to find all her awol psychic cats on her spaceship the La Sirena Negra. Her mission though fails and they need another job stat but before that search can start she gets a message from a shadowy crime syndicate known as The Fridge - they have her sister and she must do everything they ask or she will never be seen again. Keeping this from her crew she ends up on a variety of strange and often dangerous missions with curious goals until she reaches the point where she decides to fight back.

This is a book where I loved the emotional side of the book far more than the main plotline. Eva is a refreshing character mid-thirties, sarcastic and trying to go straight in a universe where crooked can pay more. She has a fascinating crew of people who probably have finally found a place they fit in - her best friend Pink who knows Eva less than safe backstory; Leroy a supersoldier that needs the quiet life; Min who eels happier living in her ship’s systems than her actual body and most puzzling to Eva her engineer Vakar who she gets on well with but is still puzzled by the strange sequence of pheromone smells she encounters whenever they meet. Its an intriguing found family of a crew and spending time with them and watching how Eva interacts or forgets to was a delight with lots of potential for exploring how the crew got to the same place.

The universe Valdes paints is also fun. Humanity is not the centre of all things its a mix of strange and bizarre - a touch Adams and Chambers with alien warlords who will blow up space stations if denied a date or alien dinosaurs who have soap opera style love lives. Its vivid and energetic and again a place I’d love to explore more.

The downside for me was The Fridge plot it didn’t quite gel with the wider story and I felt didn’t add enough to the main crew storyline. Evil group doing things for evil purposes feels old hat and while there are some interesting twists and turns it never came alive and more often felt in the way of getting to know the crew. Happily I hope now the scene setting is in place for future stories we can allow the crew to breathe and get to explore them even more.

This feels a very promising debut and I am looking to soon reading the next in the series (which feels like it could have legs) but it feels a series that needs to learn to breathe more but I think fans of slice of life SF will really enjoy this.