apt. Chasidah "Chaz" Bergren is the pride of the human empire's Sixth Fleet—until a trumped-up court-martial condemns her to the hellish prison planet Moabar, where life is miserable, brutish and exceedingly short. Soon after her arrival, one of the furred, 8-foot-tall Takan guards attacks her, intending rape and murder. With her military training, Chaz succeeds in killing her attacker. Then a voice from the darkness alerts her to another potential attacker—someone who is no Takan. The speaker is a ghost, a man two years dead: Gabriel "Sully" Ross Sullivan, mercenary, smuggler, bane of the Fleet and Chaz's longtime archenemy.
However, the rumors of Sully's death were not only greatly exaggerated but instigated by Sully. And now he has come to Moabar on a possibly doomed quest to liberate Chaz. This is because only Chaz, an ace starship pilot raised on the spaceport complex of Marker, has the skills and knowledge to infiltrate both Fleet and Marker. And it's on Marker that unknown, highly placed officials are running a secret gen-lab, breeding jukors. Winged, enormously powerful and illegal, jukors are near-invulnerable killing machines, and one nearly kills Chaz and Sully before they can escape Moabar. Jukor creation requires gestation in Takan females, who inevitably die in birthing the monsters. This exploitation is inciting Takan males to rape and kill human women.
Despite their enmity, Chaz agrees to work with Sully to locate and destroy the gen-lab. They aren't alone in their mission—their allies include a member of the terrifying aquatic race of psychic soul-suckers known as the Stolorth and a handful of double-agent Englarian monks. But can the monks, who minister to the Takans, be trusted? How can a Stolorth be anything other than an evil, soul-destroying monster? Can Chaz prove her innocence of the false charges and reclaim her honor? Can she overcome her enmity for Sully? Can she resist her undeniable physical attraction to the man? And Gabriel Ross Sullivan harbors a dark, dangerous secret—will Chaz discover it in time to save herself—and humankind?
Nothing new under the sun
Linnea Sinclair's Gabriel's Ghost starts with a bang, as the female protagonist kills an alien prison-guard rapist. The novel moves at a generally good clip and rises to an action-packed climax, and it develops the sexual and personal tensions between its protagonist, the likable and smart-mouthed Captain Chasidah Bergren, and her darkly enigmatic antagonist/love interest, Gabriel Ross Sullivan. With its interstellar action and its clashing leads, Gabriel's Ghost has much to offer fans of science fiction, of romance and of the crossbreed known in SF circles as SF romance.
However, Gabriel's Ghost will please few experienced readers of these forms, because it doesn't offer anything new. To experienced romance fans, the warrior-pirate-rogue-poet-enemy Sully is another Byronic variation of the standard romance-genre hero, the "alpha male." In SF terms, he's another variation of Han Solo. For experienced SF-romance fans, Sully's paranormal powers may not provide a sufficiently new twist, because so many authors have rung changes on the psychic/supernatural romantic hero since Anne Rice's seminal Interview With the Vampire (1976). Gabriel's Ghost differs from many paranormal/futuristic romances having a believably developed future, but this future comes "off the shelf," with its Evil Empire, Wookiee-ish and Submariner-esque aliens and interstellar jumpgates. Except for the heated sex scenes, the occasional strong language, and (perhaps) the female starship-captain protagonist, Gabriel's Ghost contains nothing that would be out of place in a 1950s SF magazine or novel. In other words, Gabriel's Ghost reads as if it were written by someone whose SF influences are movies and TV series.
It's clear from Linnea Sinclair's skills that Gabriel's Ghost is not the product of a writer who doesn't read. This suggests that Gabriel's Ghost is the result of a canny calculation. Most people are ignorant of or uninterested in nanotechnology, quantum states, posthumans, the singularity and other staples of post-1980s prose SF; yet a sizable population regularly pushes SF movies to box-office-busting new records. Too, the prose-fiction readership (of both books and magazines) is becoming ever more dominated by women and girls. Female-oriented
romance fiction reportedly accounts for some 50 percent of mass-market fiction sales. Paranormal/futuristic romance is that field's fastest-growing subgenre. A romantically charged SF novel that sticks to humanoid aliens and media-SF technology is poised to pull an enormous audience from several genres and media. And for this largely prose-SF-inexperienced audience, Gabriel's Ghost is a good, reader-friendly "starter novel."
