REVIEW: Fiasco (book) by Constance Fay

Fiasco is sci-fi romance, the second book in the author's Uncharted Hearts series (trilogy?). I bought my copy new.

Review:

Bounty hunter Cyn Khaw is best known as the cold-blooded killer who spaced a ship full of slavers. Most recently, she pretended to be a woman named Generosity in order to infiltrate a cult and rescue her clients' daughter.

Inside, Cyn is an absolute mess. She practically lives on stims and barely sleeps, because, when she does, she has screaming nightmares about the incident with the slaver ship. Although her reputation is useful, she isn't nearly as cold-blooded as people think. She has one goal driving her: to find and destroy her cousin Aymbe's killer, the man known as the Abyssal Abductor.

When the Abductor kidnaps Estella Escajeda's secret daughter, Cyn agrees to help, even though it'll mean working with the crew of the Calamity - teamwork isn't Cyn's forte. This setup is even less appealing when Cyn learns that the Calamity used to be the Quest, which means she'll be in close quarters with Micah, the attractive medic who tried to help her when he thought she was trapped in a cult.

I liked the first book in this series well enough, but this one was even better. I found Cyn to be more appealing and interesting than Temper - she was believable both as a badass bounty hunter and a deeply screwed up woman whose biggest weakness was that she couldn't trust anyone around her even just enough to sleep around them. She was attracted to Micah, but not to the point where it got in the way of her ability to function. If anything was going to get in the way of her ability to function, it was going to be her lack of sleep and overuse of stims. 

Overall, I really liked her extreme spikiness, as well as the fact that Micah was more intrigued than put off by it. Considering how deeply damaged she was, I wasn't sure the author would manage to create a satisfactory romance between her and Micah, but I ended up loving them as a couple (although I should mention that there's a bit of "magic cure-all sex" to their story - I was okay with it, but I could see how it might bother other readers). By the end of the book, I appreciated Cyn's family as well.

I'm really looking forward to Book 3, which, ugh, won't be out until March 2025. Crossing my fingers that Itzel eventually gets a book of her own too.