Book 15 of 2024: Devil's Gun (The Disco Space Opera, 2)

[thistlechaser]

Devil's Gun (The Disco Space Opera, 2) by Cat Rambo.

Quick synopsis: In the last third of the book (the first 60% had no plot), the crew of You Sexy Thing had to deal with a small-time bad guy, an ancient and dead space moth, and a were-lion clone.

Plot: Book 2 of the Disco Space Opera trilogy; book 1, You Sexy Thing, was reviewed by me here.

The first two-thirds of this book had no plot at all. Nothing happened. The crew only talked about or thought about their backstories and relations with each other. This was completely pointless -- book one introduced them and we knew about them enough to continue with book one's plot. The plot of book two did not need to be held up for two-thirds of the book for more backstory.

At about the 65% point of the book, the plot started up. (Though honestly, by that point I had lost interest.) A small-time bad guy (a captain of a different ship) had serious anger management problems. Serious, serious, serious. He was about as realistic as the bad guy from book one (as in: not at all). Dealing with him was Plot A, including a romp through the corpse of a giant dead space moth. I skimmed about half of it.

Plot B was the slightly more interesting one. In book one, we met two were-lion twins. One of them was killed, and the other was over the top mourning him. Finally the small-time bad guy from Plot A slipped the remaining twin illegal cloning tech, so mourning twin made a clone of dead twin. Since the clone had no memories and a different personality and all that, this plot was the more interesting one to me, but unfortunately it got a fraction of the time Plot A got.

Writing/editing: I wish this trilogy had been organized differently. Take the two-thirds of a book of backstory from this one, narrow it down to the necessary bits, then add it into the character introductions in book one.

Other than that, the writing and editing were fine.

What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: I need a realistic, believable threat in my stories, and unfortunately the bad guys in both books were just not believable at all.

Also, the captain of You Sexy Thing had love for an alien plant person that lasted through many many years of them not seeing each other, it just felt over the top and not believable to me.

Finally, I feel like I've had the You Sexy Thing song stuck in my head for weeks now, and it's driving me insane.

Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: 2. I wish I could have enjoyed this book. I stuck through the two-thirds of character backstory part of the book to get to the plot part, but I should have DNFed it.

Sadly I won't be picking up the final book of the trilogy.