Montgomery Quinn‘s The Sheriff: Canis Station seems to be the start of a new sci-fi series where humans are not part of the galactic community… and to be honest I’m not really sure what to compare it to. While it’s got a similar quantity of and style to its sex scenes as the author’s other series I’ve read, the setting, characters, and event developments are all rather different. For the most part it works well enough, but I’m not sold on the conclusion’s spontaneously elusive alien bodysnatchers angle.
A stand-alone novel, Roger Black‘s The Admiral & The Assistant is divided into three parts. The first covers the protagonists’ first meeting up to their admitting their feelings to one another, the second deals with advancing that relationship from something covert into being fully official, and then the last third gets a bit weird with a focus on a Mass Effect Reaper-like threat. Overall it’s quite good and I can’t say I have any complaints beyond it being hard to believe that the galaxy-ending threat only has a single ship.