Do you have trouble letting people in?

Sal, the heroine of Mistwalker, has witnessed so much loss in her life, that she struggles to let people get too close to her. The planet – Ver Day – where she lives, is a tough place. The original settlers escaped an ecological hellscape where the land, water, and air were polluted beyond use and wrote environmental – and political – protections into their new planet’s constitution. Until now, it has worked: the colonists of Ver Day live in a guarded harmony with the jungles that surround them. If someone gets killed by the flora or fauna, they were either dumb or suffering from bad luck.

Sal, at the start of this book is suffering a run of bad luck: she’s late picking up her manifest for the delivery she’s contracted to drag through the jungle to remote settlements because her regular partner got pregnant; someone in a bar fight she was trying to stop hit her over the head with a chair leg, giving her a concussion – and delaying her further; the government stooges who have to hand over her load are acting squirrelly, like maybe they took a bribe to assign her delivery to that stranger that’s hanging around. Oh, and she mistakenly hires a temp replacement partner who turns out to be an offworlder, a newbie – and newbies are dumb to the ways of Ver Day, which means they’re at risk of dying inconveniently.

And Sal doesn’t need anyone else in her life dying inconveniently.

The newbie, Raschad, has his own trust issues. Raised by a family that makes the jackals of Succession look like The Brady Bunch, he watched most of his family get assassinated, leaving just his sick mother and a younger sibling. Exiled to Ver Day without any resources, he must continue to prove that he’s still there and still alive, or his evil grandfather will have what’s left of his family killed. And his grandfather’s enemies want him dead too, as he’s in line to inherit his grandfather’s empire. Anyone getting close to Raschad will be at risk; but luckily nobody on Ver Day wants anything to do with a newbie.

Except Sal – and she was tricked into hiring him.

Now, if they can just trust each other enough to survive the jungle wild, the hostility of the settlers they’re carrying deliveries to, a pack of rioting strangers who are ambushing travelers, and two of the riskiest species to encounter in the woods: one of which swarms violently consuming anything in it’s path; and another which is rarely seen but, for some reason, has started stalking Raschad.

This is another of my favorite books and I read it at least once – and often, more than once – a year. I keep an eye out for it at used book sales because my copy is starting to fall apart. It was part of the awesome DelRey Discovery series… does anyone else shop by scanning the shelves for the publisher’s logo? I do this with a couple of publishers, DelRey Discovery being one.

When reading, I like books with vivid settings and where people have to try to figure out how to survive in new environments. This book has both – as well as a fast-moving plot and fun characters. It’s kind of in the mold of a space western: the small town on the edge of the wilderness living barely out of poverty, the army fort that’s supposed to be protecting them but has it’s own agenda; the impending threat of being overrun by natives (in this case, not indigenous people, but packs of clever and violent predators similar to baboons). But, unlike many space westerns, the tech here is minimal: a running joke is Sal counting up the number of tech things she owns.

I also like the tension between Sal and Raschad. They fight their attraction – luckily there’s so much going on around them that they have to pay attention to, that they have little time to think about their feelings. And they keep fighting it throughout the book until they finally figure out how to let each other in on the last page of the book.

If you like space westerns, jungle stories, unlikely love stories along the line of The African Queen, intrigue – I recommend Mistwalker.

Happy Valentines Day.