Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes
Series: Chilling Effect: Book 1
Pages: 416
Format: Paperback
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.
This is one of the few books I didn’t know anything about before reading – it was a sci-fi novel with psychic cats, and that was enough for me to give it a shot. Chilling Effect is a fun, quirky space opera with a believable romance subplot (within the context) and a sweet, messy found family. The tone flip-flops between light-hearted and serious moments quite a bit, but it does not have a negative effect on the overall narrative. It was also fun to see all of Eva’s Cuban/Spanish phrases mixed in. You’ll definitely need to keep Google Translate nearby if you want to get the full effect of the dialogue and phrases (there are a lot of them), but paying attention to context clues gives a general idea of what Eva’s saying if you aren’t that patient.
The depth of the world reminds me of the old sci-fi shows from the 80’s to the early 2000’s. There’s a wide variety of places, peoples/aliens, and cultures, and some questions about these aspects never get answered (or could potentially be answered in a later book). Still, they are each vividly unique in their presentation and connection to each other and Eva. Valdes makes it pretty clear that a lot is going on in the background of this world that we aren’t explicitly shown, so there are a lot of possible directions this series could go. It’s not obvious right off the bat where Valdes intends the Chilling Effect series to end up. There are quite a few alien species to keep track of, some of which are harder to imagine than others. So, even though it’s easy to get lost in the setting, I feel this adds to the sci-fi atmosphere rather than detracts from it.
There were a few things that kept me from making this a perfect five stars. With one or two exceptions, most of the secondary characters felt flat compared to Eva. Don’t get me wrong, everyone has meticulously crafted personalities and traits, so they are far from boring. But the majority of the side and secondary characters came across as “what you see is what you get.” Eva is a complicated character existing within a gray zone of morality; I wasn’t picking up on that for a lot of the others, which is all right since we aren’t really seeing anything from their perspective. But it might be considered one of the novel’s weaker points.
Eva was a fascinating character, mostly because Valdes leans into making her a highly imperfect protagonist. Even though I sometimes disagreed with Eva’s decisions, her choices were human and she does eventually take steps to remedy her mistakes. But she did seem to lose direction partway through the book, and I was relying on external events to inform me of the narrative’s direction, not necessarily Eva. The book still had tension, but Eva’s character floundered for a short bit and then gained direction again towards the end.
I really enjoyed this book for all its shenanigans and emotional points, and it certainly makes for a fun sci-fi read.
AMBER BUDD - Author 