This is the first Sarah Hoyt I’ve read, though we’ve been in contact through social media for a while. But I met Sarah in person at the WordFire Press booth at Denver Comic Con this year, and bought a copy of Darkship Thieves. This week, I got to read it.

This is fast-paced, indeed rollicking, adventure. It’s also romance. It’s also Heinleinian philosophical futurist musings, dressed up as Heinlein dressed his, as musings about an imaginary past-future. It is a tale of an Earth-born aristocrat who wakes up in her father’s ship to what appears to be a mutiny and attempted kidnapping. Her flight puts her into space in an escape pod, which is picked up not by the Earthlings of Circum Terra, but by Kit, a genetically modified superhuman from a semi-legendary lost tribe of rebels exiled from their Earthly home and now living in hiding in asteroid homes.

Kit is dangerous, moody, self-condemning and possibly a murderer. This makes him a great brooding Byronic hero… only here, captain of a space ship, scion of a noble spacefaring clan, and telepath. But Athena Hera Sinistra is no damsel to be saved from her distress — she’s a fighter, a doer, a kicker of hostile men in sensitive places, and a real hoot to read.

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