Fortune’s Pawn
by Rachel Bach
Paperback, 320 pg.
Orbit, 2013
I’d planned on starting off here by saying, “there are shades of Ann Aguirre’s Sirantha Jax books here, but just shades.” Then listing off a few other things this reminded of. But I abandoned that because that list was getting too long — and I don’t want to paint Bach’s work as totally derivative. Which I never thought about until I started thinking about it — it feels like any number of SF (and even Fantasy) worlds, yes, but Fortune’s Pawn is it’s own world. The fact that it feels familiar just allows the reader to skip all the world-building, all the “this is how we travel great distances without taking generations” stuff, etc.; and just cut to the story.
Devi Morris is a mercenary with ambition and dreams — she’s got her eyes set on joining the elite of the elite and will whatever it takes to get there, as fast as possible. Which leads her to a tour on a notorious ship — its activities may not be the most legal, and the security forces on it see more action than anyone else. But when she’s done, she’ll be light years’ closer to her goal. Along the way, she gets to do what she loves — drink more than a little, chum around with the ship’s cook, berate her partner and bust a few heads. All in all, just what she’s looking for.
Naturally, things don’t stay that way — things get mysterious, spooky and even pretty impossible. Not so fun for Devi, lots of fun for the reader.
The supporting characters are interesting and well drawn, the universe that Devi calls home is familiar enough for comfort, distinctive enough to be interesting. There’s some humor, some good fight scenes, odd alien races/manners, a splash of something like romance, pretty much everything you’d like in a novel. The major plot complications that show up at the end are more than enough to get me eager for the second volume of the trilogy — and, most likely, the third.
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