This book was a blast:
✨ touch her and 💀(RIP all the peeps who touched her)
✨ if villain, why hot?
✨ fated mates
✨ no one is TSTL yet you spend the whole book fearing for their lives
✨ a hint of “This is the skin of a killer, Bella.”

There were two things I particularly vibed with with the sci-fi world building:
🪐 there was something very 2025 zeitgeist-y (despite the 2016 pub date) about how cynical this series was about technology and capitalism (we were neither techno-optimistic nor techno-dystopian about these spacefaring future humans)
🪐 normally, I avoid ‘elite soldier’ MMCs like the plague (speaking of propaganda I’m not falling for)—but these alien guys all had such a War Is A Racket (1935 book/speech criticizing what would become known as the military industrial complex) by Smedley Butler feel to them that I was into it

[read in chronological order (book 1, 4, 5, 7, 2, 3...) not publication order]