Sky Hunter (Skybound)

Title:
Author: Fae Sutherland
Cover artist: n/a
Publisher:
Amazon: Sky Hunter (Skybound)
Genre: space opera m/m romance
Length: 53000 words
Rating: 3.25 stars out of 5

A guest review by Sirius.

Summary: Last member of Annie’s crew finds love

Blurb:

Book three of Skybound

Jeret hasn’t looked back since running away from life as a crown prince and joining the Crux Ansata’s crew, but when the Ansata returns to his home system, he finds his father ill and a traitor maneuvering for control. Now that he’s a full-grown man, he can’t just walk away again.

Letting Jeret escape was the biggest black mark on bounty hunter Dagan Nu’aim’s otherwise distinguished years as a royal guard. When he catches Jeret back in-system, Dagan seizes the chance to regain his lost honor and bring the wayward prince home.

Jeret’s not so sure he wants to go, but the reignition of his old crush on Dagan complicates the issue. As the two unravel a tangled plot against the crown, their old friendship lights up with a fiery new desire. And when the traitor strikes and the two men must choose between duty and freedom, neither is certain which to pick.

Take flight with the Crux Ansata in Sky Riders and Sky Runners, available now!

Review:

I reviewed the first book in this series here and second book here. Oh how I hoped to like this book better than I liked the first two. Unfortunately it did not work out.

In this book we again meet the crew of Crux Ansata (Annie) and now it is the turn of crew mechanic, super tech genius Jeret  to find love. The set up of this book promised to me antagonistic chemistry between Jeret, who as blurb tells you was apparently a crown prince and Dagan, who was his body guard and now he is looking for Jeret to bring him back home if he is still alive. I also thought that this book has more action than other two stories. I mean they all have *some* action in it, but I thought “space opera” element was a little more visible in this one, opinions may differ of course.

I actually was worried to start this one because based on the blurb I was thinking maybe Dagan would kidnap Jeret and I did not really wanted that. Well, I underestimated some characters, because this is not what happen. I liked that Dagan and Jeret knew each other before they meet again in this book – that to me set up more interesting dynamics between them than the couples in the first two books. We see guilt, genuine regret from both of them about what happened in the past and I liked reading that. Unfortunately I could barely recognize Jeret in this book. Strong, smart young man who actually saved his friends’ asses in the previous books seemed to become somebody who wants his man to come after him and save him. That was my interpretation anyway. I was glad that he took some initiative and came up with a plan once, but overall for me he was just too passive and too dependable on Dagan in this book. And what was that with punishment by withholding sex?. I cannot say more for the fear of spoilers, but I wished somebody would put Jeret over his knee and spank the crap out of him.

I liked that Jeret struggled to reconcile two parts of himself in this book and would have liked to see more of such struggle, but as I said, it felt like with introducing his love interest half of his wits and strength was gone.

Dagan was okay, I guess, but once again, strong, good and honorable is the only description I can come up with for him and I liked the idea of them being together, of realizing how youthful feelings came back, became stronger and maybe they can built a future on them. However, I wished there was a little more introspection about the fact that what they had  before was friendship and a one sided crush. I wish they would both realized that they need to learn more about each other because they spent years apart and people do change during the years apart.

Identity of the traitor bothered me a lot. Unfortunately I cannot explain why without going into pretty big spoilers.