I don’t know how to talk about this book.

Okay, that’s not true. I really liked it and all of you should read it. I really liked it and … most of you should read it. Some of you should read it! All of you who have read You Sexy Thing, the original book in this series, should read it, and those of you who have not read You Sexy Thing should go read that and then read this in its proper context in the second book of what is going to be at least a trilogy. I have no idea what Cat Rambo’s contract for this series is; all I know is that as long as they keep writing these books I’m going to keep reading them.

I read speculative fiction, so I am well used to devouring books in trilogies if not longer series than that. And a trilogy in particular has a certain rhythm to it, and what that means is that the second book in a trilogy can be really hard to write in such a way that it doesn’t feel like moving pieces around on a board in preparation for book three, which will actually solve things. And the biggest weakness of Devil’s Gun is that it’s one of the most second-booky second books I’ve ever read.

What’s that mean? Well, most of the characters– the strong point of the series, about a ship’s crew that moonlights as the staff of an elite sci-fi restaurant, or maybe about the staff of an elite sci-fi restaurant that moonlights as a ship’s crew, it’s hard to say– are dealing with various and sundry traumas and/or life changes from Book One. Very few of these traumas are resolved in any meaningful way, although a couple of them definitely see very serious evolution over the course of this book. The titular “Devil’s Gun” is a MacGuffin that the crew is looking for so that they can eliminate the big villain of the first book, who is after them again. The big villain who never once appears on page in the entirety of Devil’s Gun. Not a single scene. They never see him. The whole book is relying on your memory of Tubal Last being terrifying in the first book.

Well, okay, and also on this one thing he did that was really bad, and which reverberates through the entirety of Gun, but he does that thing in You Sexy Thing.

In a way, all of this isn’t really a problem, because no one is going to pick up Devil’s Gun on its own, or at least if they do they’ll recognize that they screwed up. And to a certain extent it feels really ridiculous for me of all people to be criticizing book-two-of-a-trilogy for being, well, book two of a trilogy. But this one doesn’t stand up on its own at all, to the point where it’s notable. I mean, important stuff happens, it’s not like, oh, Book 2 of The Wheel of Time, which could be reduced to a single-page prologue of Book 3 without eliminating anything significant. It’s not filler. It’s just not a complete story on its own. And your ability to enjoy it will depend entirely on your ability to ignore that fact.

Beyond that, though, I genuinely do love this series– it was originally described as “Farscape meets The Great British Baking Show,” and bam, the second I heard that, I spent money. And I should probably have said this in the first paragraph, but I got this for free again, meaning that I’ve gotten both books in this series mailed to me early and then went out and bought both of them anyway. There’s still a sexy bird-creature and one character who is a sentient blob and another who’s an ape and the first mate/head chef is seven feet tall and has four arms and this was probably unfair of me but I spent most of the book picturing one of the characters as Lion-O. I can read about these people forever; they’re awesome. You should read about them too; just make absolutely sure you do it in order.