Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes
(Chilling Effect, Book 1)
Released: September 17, 2019 | Genre: Science Fiction, Space Opera, Comedy
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SYNOPSIS
A hilarious, offbeat debut space opera that skewers everything from pop culture to video games and features an irresistible foul-mouthed captain and her motley crew, strange life forms, exciting twists, and a galaxy full of fun and adventure.
Captain Eva Innocente and the crew of La Sirena Negra cruise the galaxy delivering small cargo for even smaller profits. When her sister Mari is kidnapped by The Fridge, a shadowy syndicate that holds people hostage in cryostasis, Eva must undergo a series of unpleasant, 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 after she rejects his advances, and her sweet 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.
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Chilling Effect started as a short story about sexual harassment, not a space opera about psychic cats. Valerie Valdes originally wrote a short story inspired by the #YesAllWomen movement, about a woman rejecting a guy at a bar who has an over the top reaction, and her friends convinced her to turn it into a novel.
REVIEW
⭐ ⭐ ☆ ☆ ☆
A book is not the best medium for this story.
It’s entertaining, unique, and occasionally funny, definitely not bad, but Chilling Effect leans heavily on situational comedy, where characters land in unusual scenarios and strange settings. There’s nothing wrong with that, but in a book, it takes longer to set up and describe these moments, which can dull their impact. This kind of humor often works better on screen, where timing is everything. In writing, witty banter or sharp, snappy humor tends to land better, but the little that’s here felt a bit stale.
I’m also not a fan of it being yet another Firefly copycat. Plenty have tried to capture that “ragtag motley crew in space” magic, and Chilling Effect is just the latest in a long list of imitators that don’t quite measure up.
It’s possible the book is better than I gave it credit for, but I’ve been burned out on sci-fi comedies lately, and this one’s style of humor just didn’t hit the mark for me.
