Reviewed by Carissa
TITLE: Letting Lier and Finding Pax
SERIES: The Solar Sailors Saga
AUTHOR: Harper Moon
PUBLISHER: Dreamspinner Press
LENGTH: 200 pages
BLURB:
For refusing the crown and renouncing his title, Prince Lier was eternally banished from the planet of Arden. After finding asylum in a Deep Space colony, he took a position in a bordello as the Master of Ceremonies. During Lier’s exile, Emperor Sardius I conquered Arden and slaughtered Lier’s people. From the destruction arose a new species dependent on blood. Seizing the opportunity, Sardius praises vampirism and blueprints mass blood manufacturing with Lier’s blood as the key. Lier is not only the last of his kind, but his blood is strangely addictive.
On a mission to capture Lier, Commander Raze, son of Sardius, can’t help but try it for himself. When he does, he experiences strange flashbacks of himself with Lier. Tense relations between captor and captive blur the line between past and present.
During the perilous journey to Arden, forces opposed to Sardius attempt to rescue their lost prince. Raze’s mission changes from retrieval to survival. Soon it becomes clear that, although neither man recognizes what the other has become, this meeting is not their first. And by no means will it be their last.
REVIEW:
To say that this book didn’t agree with me, would be like saying I don’t care for spiders. Way too much of an understatement, and I kinda want to beat them both to death with a broom.
Lier–who apparently is some type of once in a century magical wunderkind–has got himself banished from his home planet of Arden. So he does what anyone in that situation would–become a whore. Or maybe not–I was never quite clear on what his role in that brothel was. Unfortunately his exile leads to his home planet being plum pickings for the evil (and apparently indestructible) Emperor Sardius. Mr. Evil himself kills all of Lier’s people, subjugates the other co-ruling race on the planet, and generally is evil (you know, killing people for the fun of it, plotting to take over the universe, indulging in evil scientific and magical experiments–the usual run of the mill evil-villain stuff).
Skip forward an indeterminate amount of years, and that is where our story takes off. See Lier, last of his kind and possessor the ye olde magic blood, is wanted by Sardius, so he asks his ‘son’ Raze to be a good boy and go fetch the might-be whore and once-upon-a-time prince, so that Sardius can have his evil way with him. But *gasp* Raze may not be who he says he is, who he thinks he is, and sending him to fetch Lier might be the best worst decision that Sardius has ever had. Because once Raze taste Lier’s blood (oh, did I mention that a bunch of people get turned into vampires by the big bad empire?) certain hidden, and uncomfortable truths are going to come to light!
At some point I really do feel like I owe this review an apology…so here it is: I am sorry. You are just the by-product of too many assholes in too many weeks, and I am afraid you are just going to have to stand there and take it like the big motherfucking man you want to be. I may also have just drunk my fifth cup of coffee in like three hours. Not that I am apologizing for that, just you know, a general warning or something. This is about to get a bit ranty.
First off, if you wish to spend a whole book making one of your MCs a rapist, abusive, asshole, you cannot expect me to just shrug my shoulders when he ‘wakes up’ and just forgive him. And I have a hard time forgiving Lier for doing so. Raze made me want to shove him out of an airlock and throw a party as his body swirled around out in space. So he made a great villain, I’ll give you that. He had flaws, he had doubts, but still went on murderous rampages in between raping, violating, and almost killing our ‘hero’. Great villain–trashy and absolutely horrible MC. The only time we get even close to anything I can sympathize with is in the last five pages, and by then he has been stripped of all his power and is reduced to the fawning maiden in need of rescue.
Lier wasn’t much better, either. I could never pin down his personality. He was simpering, or he was brash; he was broken, or he was the strongest motherfucker in the universe; he was wanted to die, or he wanted to live. This wasn’t so much of a bad thing, but it was confusing when the change seemed to always happen on the turn of a dime. And I spent a lot of time trying to figure out his whole crazy feelings for Raze/Pax…and never could. Even with all the flashbacks I could never pinpoint a reason that was good enough to care for Raze after all he had done to Lier. Especially since very little of it was good. And Lier’s nonchalant decision to just ditch a friend, on a hostile planet, just pissed me off.
The frustrating part of all this is that I could have liked Raze and I could have understood Lier, but there just wasn’t enough foundation for me to get there. This book is all about the fast tempo, the action, the quick rush from one disaster to the next, and I never got the time to let the characters become more than just the harsh notes. There is not enough down time in this novel. Every time they find a way out of a bad situation they are immediately shoved into the next one, and two hundred pages of that is just too much. I learned how they fight, how they hurt each other, how they react when faced with life or death situations (and I have to say that their reactions don’t exactly speak well of them)–but I am given very little that I care about.
And for the love of god, did we need yet another ‘Great and Indestructible’ bad guy littering the pages of novels? Ok, this one is just a pet peeve, but my anger still stands. It seemed so incredibly cliché to have this guy lurking around in the background who was completely evil, and completely insane, and hell bent on complete domination of everything and everyone. I think I like my villains to be a bit more realistic than that. And when you make your bad guy so all powerful, it requires that your heroes be the same. And that is something I just dislike. But like I said, that is more a personal issue. I can’t really fault a book for doing something I dislike–at least like that–because I don’t actually expect authors to read my mind. It just made the reading experience all the more difficult for me.
And it was difficult to read, because it felt like the author got a list of my top ten pet peeves and just went to town on them. The science fiction aspect of this book was confusing (was it really necessary to name every planet starting with and ‘A’?) and at times just plain unrealistic. The combination of old ideals and new technology in these societies I never quite understood. If felt at time like it was just an excuse to use fancy old words and dialogue, but still have access to ‘magical’ cure-alls. It just felt disjointed most of the time. Then there was the random head-hopping, the late addition of THE BIG MISUNDERSTANDING, and enough side plots that everything came out a snarled mess.
And did I mention how much an all-powerful villain pisses me off?
Ugh…yeah. So this book did not work for me at all. And I am willing to admit that some of it (at least half) was my own personality getting in the way of the story. But…I still feel that the overall tempo, and plethora of plot lines, really made this story fall where it could have towered. Maybe I just expect too much out of my scifi, I don’t know. I just know that I probably won’t be reading on in this series even if the thing ended teetering on the edge of a cliff.
RATING: 
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