Last Call by Naomi Lucas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Allie has been alone for years.
Last Call
Stranded on an unknown, uninhabitable planet billions of miles away from Earth, being the only survivor of a disastrous crash landing, she has little hope left for rescue. Each day she is consumed with the task of foraging for food, finding shelter, and avoiding predators. But the nights are the worst.. When the planet freezes over and she is left with nothing but her demons. That is until the day she sees a ship fall out of the sky.
Where do Cyborgs go when there is no war? When every being in the galaxy fears you?
When you’re a living, breathing computer virus?
Several decades after the galactic humanoid war between the Earthians and the Trentians, Jack has made a name for himself as one of the best bounty hunters in the cosmos. Tasked with pursuing an especially dangerous pirate to a remote location, his ship is caught in a fluke meteor storm. Stranded with ship repairs on a dust rock, also known as Hell-in-Space, he encounters a damaged, beautiful woman. The greatest bounty hunt of his life.
Tremors!
The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 🩵🖤❤️💜💚
Heat/Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥
Story/Plot: 📕📗📙📘📔
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌏🌍
Character development: ☺️😍🥰😁😋
The heroine: Allie – she is the only survivor of a terrible spaceship crash onto an extremely inhospitable planet, a planet she calls “Hell-in-Space”. She has survived alone for years and had given up hope of ever being rescued. She regularly deals with terrible sandstorms, staying hidden from giant snake-like monsters that come from under the ground, finding shelter, food and water and much more. The one thing she ever looks forward to are the meteor showers that always seem to follow the sandstorms, so she does her best to dig herself out as soon as the storms abate.
The Hero: Jack – he is a cyborg, the only one in existence who can control his nano cells into a virus if he so chooses. Though it made him feared even among the rest of his kind. He was created specifically to fight in the galactic war between the humans and the Trentians. Though now, decades after the war ended, he spends his time being one of the best bounty hunters in the galaxy.
The Story: Allie had grown up on a Trentian planet on the edges of the galaxy. When she was fourteen, she was tested to see if she could be bred and was lucky enough to be found fertile. The unlucky ones ended up being servants or working in the pleasure domes. Allie was taken to a female-only community until it was time for a Trentian warlord to choose her. When she was seventeen, she was chosen by an awful warlord but was smuggled away with other women in her community before he took her, then the crash occurred.
“Jack knew that Cyborgs like himself were walking, talking Earthian-made abominations. Perfectly designed to resemble intimidating human males and females– closely enough for subterfuge but distinct in their domineering aura and mannerisms. They represented a harmonious union between bio-organics and advanced cybernetic technology. They were new-age Frankenstein monsters.”
“Jack, meanwhile, was designed to be a living computer virus, ever changing, ever evolving, and always one step ahead. He could connect to all manner of machines and take control. He could infect them with his nanobots and then track those bots all over the cosmos. Earthians and Trentians alike had tried to off him on numerous occasions, and even his own brethren were wary of him because he could corrupt their systems.”
Jack is tracking a particularly elusive pirate that he is contracted to find. The pirate captain Larik is a half-breed that is wanted by the Earthian Council for trafficking human females to Trent colonies for breeding among other things. Jack is close behind Larik when he ends up stuck in a meteor storm and is forced to land on the nearby planet to repair his damaged ship. He is surprised to find a human female all alone and surviving on the planet.
I liked the fact that Jack and Allie teamed up to trek to her broken ship which was a few days away and the giant worms under the surface of the planet became a bit of a problem. It reminded me of that movie Tremors with Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward. I loved that movie (not so much the sequels). This story also added in a bit of a supernatural villain to the mix.
I loved the fact that Allie had a super strong character, she would have to since she spent years alone on an uninhabitable planet, (kind of like Tom Hanks in Castaway), but she was also small and fragile and needy in certain ways. I also love the way Jack felt so protective of her and took care of her. Overall, this book was exciting, suspenseful, romantic and steamy!
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