I came for the psychic cats and stayed for the fantastic characters, hilarious jokes, and lady-led, explosion heavy, wonderfully ludicrous plot(s).

Valerie Valdes has crafted a delightful space adventure with all of the most essential elements: the aforementioned cats, an alien emperor with an ego so huge he can’t stand being turned down by a mere human, gangsters, secret agents, a terrible blood family, and an incredible found one.

There are so many reasons to love Chilling Effect (Harper Voyager, 2019). The MC, Eva, is hilarious; has the bilingual mouth of a space trucker; and is a hard ass who doesn’t wear so much armor that her crew, and the reader, are blocked from witnessing her interior life. So often, women in sci-fi are one-dimensional and of either the ass-kicking variety – stoic as hell and completely devoid of an interior life – or completely helpless and in need of rescue.

Eva exists in the same part of the Venn diagram, however, as Rey or Leia: an individual who can front and show the bravado when necessary but who is also willing to be honest about her feelings, cry (even if she hates it), get angry, make mistakes, and ultimately do her best to do the right thing.

The female friendships in the novel are so strong and so honest, especially between Eva and Pink, that they put me in mind of what my best friend calls a Life Decisions Committee: a group of women you can go to for advice, for lighting a fire under your ass, and for comfort. They’re always there for you and while there can be breaches, love will always seal the over, even if there’s some scar tissue.

Your Life Decisions committee is really good at making a distinction between you and your actions, which allows them to support you even if they hate a decision you’ve made. We see so little of that in fiction, so to see it in Chilling Effect was pretty damn magical. And despite there being a budding romance between Eva and her engineer, Pink’s opinion and presence are always Eva’s first priority, and vice versa.

Speaking of that romance… it starts and stops, advances, falls backwards. It’s sweet and awkward and at several points hysterically funny, though it never moves into that territory of uber awkwardness that has forced me out of rooms when it happens on TV or to cover my ears and ears when it occurs in a movie. Both members of the couple make the error of assuming the other can’t handle their shit and end up lying to each other only to realize, if they’d been honest in the first place, so much less harm may have been done.

But both are also willing to be accountable, if grudgingly, for their mistakes, to apologize, and to forgive. They are very much a real couple, albeit in a fictional world, and it gives the reader a chance to laugh at their own romantic mistakes rather than feel ashamed or embarrassed because damned if we don’t all make them – even rad space captains and alien engineers.

Chilling Effect is also one of those rare novels that manages to be both character and plot driven. So much happens and it comes from so many angles that it’s potentially difficult to keep track of, but Valdes does that for you, bringing you up to speed quickly and succinctly whenever it’s necessary. At no point did I have to go back and reread, and that’s saying something with the way my memory is these days.

All of those snarky little story bunnies are worthy of a whole book in and of themselves, and the fact that Valdes manages not only to include them all but also to weave them all together and wrap them all up without dropping any threads is pretty remarkable. That she manages to do so and still craft characters the reader cares about is masterful.

Chilling Effect is definitely in my top five of this year, and I’ve read/listened to 104 books at the time of writing so… take that as you will. I’m here to tell you not to sleep on this one, sci-fi fans, and also to spread the good word that there’s a sample of Book 2 at the end of the novel, which means MOAR EVA AND CO is forthcoming. I, for one, can’t wait.