Cherijo Torin finally has some downtime. She's escaped from bounty hunters, married the enigmatic Captain Duncan Reever and eluded the deranged geneticist who engineered her. Now she's cruising through space aboard her husband's ship, teaching surgery and contemplating how she'll relate her adventures to her unborn child.

But Cherijo cannot escape her own body. Her hyperdeveloped immune system dissolves the fetus, just as a transfusion of her poisonous blood killed her first lover. Worse, her creator, Joseph Grey Veil, is still obsessed with her. Lured into a booby-trapped ship, Cherijo and Duncan are hauled back to Earth, where a court affirms what Veil has said all along: Cherijo is not a person, she's property—Veil's property.

Despite her earlier miscarriage, Veil wants to inseminate Cherijo with his own to DNA to try to create the perfect child, and he'll torture Duncan to get her to cooperate. In the nick of time, Cherijo and Duncan are rescued by a strange tribe of ex-Navajos who live nearby, in the centuries-abandoned subway tunnels.

They are far from safe, however: The tribe won't let them leave. Some of the tribe play shockball, a team sport in which players suffer electric shocks for every foul. The players are half-alien, bred for an edge. The chief demands that Cherijo help them pass for full Terrans.

Duncan, forcing the issue, is dangerously wounded in a knife fight. The tribe has little medical equipment; Cherijo knows that her only hope is her hated father. With the help of tribal outcasts, she returns to Veil's lab, exchanging her freedom for Veil's help in saving Duncan—only to have the ex-Navajos abduct her a second time. The angry chief not only requires Cherijo to treat the players, but forces Duncan to play the barbaric game as well. Cherijo must watch her husband endure pain for others' sport, even as old enemies close in on her underground prison.

Genetically enhanced fun

For such a brilliant and self-sufficient, not to mention genetically enhanced, young woman, Cherijo Torin has a knack for finding herself at the mercy of others. Over the previous three installments in the excellent Stardoc series, she's been hunted down, imprisoned and enslaved. In this book, she (and her husband and her cat) are kidnapped not once, but four times, snatched back and forth like a plaything in the hands of bickering brothers. It's as though the good doctor must be physically moved from one setting to another for that section of the plot to advance.

Cherijo herself has been justly praised as a breath of fresh air—a smart, saucy professional who's rendered vulnerable by the fact of her own existence. How she deals with carving out a normal life as an abnormal person recalls, and improves on, Heinlein's Friday. She's been paired with her own personal hero, the tall, dark and psychic Captain Duncan Reever, but poor Duncan is down for the count once that ill-advised knife fight damages what turns out to be his only kidney. That opens the door for various powers to truss him up to get Cherijo to do their bidding, leaving her to mope around, castigating her captors. Her scenes of inner anguish are so riveting that the intervening periods of mere detention seem like marking time.

Fans of the series will enjoy the nuggets of backstory revealed here. Both Cherijo's history with her creator and Veil's intentions toward her are brought to a climax, and other characters in the novel are unexpectedly tied into Cherijo's past, with a trail of breadcrumbs at the end to help Cherijo discover who she really is. The reader seems to be invited along as an amicable companion, and such is the force of Cherijo's personality that it sounds like fun—sarcastic grousing and all. If only people would stop kidnapping her, she'd be set.