Lady Eve's Last Con
By Rebecca Fraimow
Ruth Johnson and her sister Jules have been small-time hustlers on the interstellar cruise lines for years. But then Jules fell in love with one of their targets, Esteban Mendez-Yuki, sole heir to the family insurance fortune. Esteban seemed to love her too, until she told him who she really was, at which point he fled without a word.
Now Ruth is set on disguised as provincial debutante Evelyn Ojukwu and set for the swanky satellite New Monte, she’s going to make Esteban fall in love with her, then break his heart and take half his fortune. At least, that's the plan. But Ruth hadn't accounted for his younger sister, Sol, a brilliant mind in a dashing suit... and much harder to fool.
Sol is hot on Ruth's tail, and as the two women learn each other’s tricks, Ruth must decide between going after the money and going after her heart.
Well,
I had high hopes for this one: a madcap story in space about a con
artist looking for revenge? Sign me up! But as other reviews state, the
problem is that for a screwball comedy to work, you've got to be rushed
along at a pace too fast to look around you. The minute the train slows
down you're dead in the water, so to speak. And if you couldn't tell
already, this story got slooooooow.
It's
probably about a hundred pages longer than it needs to be. Every time
we get some action, we spend another ten pages of Ruthi's internal
monologue about the setting, or going over details about the back and
forth machinations with Sol, or the local gang, that just bog things
down.
I'm not dinging
Fraimow (much) - this kind of storytelling is hard. But you've got to be
much more streamlined about it than she is here. Connie Willis is the
epitome of space screwball comedy and even she gets it wrong sometimes
(let's not speak of her most recent effort, The Road to Roswell). But there needs to
be a zingy tension that pulls the reader through it all, and instead, I
found myself putting this down multiple times, having to force myself to
finish it.
It doesn't
help that we spend more time with just Sol and Ruthi than we do in
groups, and that they show their hands to each other in the first third
of the book. Part of what's needed is more undercurrents, like
conversations where Sol and Ruthi are trying to catch each other out but
can't reveal their own cards in front of other people. Instead, after a
big confrontation on the beach satellite, we... um, wander around the
lower decks talking about frozen ducks and Sol's poor half-siblings, on a
weird pseudo date.
I
think part of the problem is that it feels like Fraimow is setting this
up for more installments. The classic version requires all storylines to
be wrapped up tightly, preferably with all couples reunited, all bad
guys punished, and all ventures successful. We don't get that. Instead
Jules is in limbo, four months pregnant and refusing to marry Esteban.
We don't see the result of the ruse on Alfonso at all and presumably the
gang will be after them again in subsequent books. And there's no real
resolution about the frickin kosher ducks, which is the whole device on
which the plot spins: what the golden girl did to get herself in so deep
with the mob that she's tempted to wipe her memory and it's wrapped up
off-screen.
So instead of
that feeling you get when you press the button on a tape measure and it
all comes whizzing back into your hand and closing with a satisfying
catch, it's like we threw a yoyo out and now it's just on the ground
flaccid and we gotta spool it back up ourselves.
There's
a lot of promise here, a lot of good things, like the characters and
the setting, and the pitter patter and well, everything else is fine.
It's just the pace, the tempo, but for something like this, that's
everything.
03: A Book About Space Tourism
