REVIEW: Maze-Born Trouble by Ginn Hale
A dead girl, a cop he can’t forget, and a price on his head. All on a space station at the edge of a black hole. Just another day’s work for P.I. Lake Harmaa. P.I. Lake Harmaa escaped the darkness and intense gravity of Sisu Space Station’s Maze Sector by turning traitor and spying for the Feds during the war. He has no intention of risking his neck by going back down into those depths, where there’s a price on his head and more than a few souls who wouldn’t mind him turning up dead. But when he’s framed for a brutal murder, Lake realizes he must return to the Maze and settle old scores.
Review:
Dear Ginn Hale,
I preordered this novella as soon as I learned that it was available. I would characterize it as a scifi mystery with romantic elements.
Amazon lists the length of the story as 80 pages and it has 1539 locations on my kindle, and I really liked that every page of it was used to the fullest. We meet Lake Haarmaa in his office when police officer Mateo Espina-Aguillar comes to question him about a certain young woman Lake was hired to find several months ago. Apparently she has been murdered and the police found Lake’s contact information (contact chip) on her. It looks like somebody is trying to frame Lake for her murder, but it is also pretty clear that Aguillar (he is called by his last name for most of the story) believes in his innocence. Lake explained that he found the girl at her father’s request, tried to give her some useful advice, and left her his contact chip, but that was it.
The story moved faster and faster with every page. Very soon, while Aguillar is still there, two people are trying to murder Lake. One of his assassins end up dead because both Lake and Aguillar fight back, and the other assassin (who was trying to run away) ends up dead as well, but not because Lake or Aguillar killed him. Somebody else did.
Lake thinks that whoever is trying to frame him is from his past. I thought the world-building was top notch, and for an 80 page story it was maybe a bit too detailed. But I am not complaining here – quite the contrary.
“ Lake had been a eight years old when Federal forces rediscovered Sisu Station and the population that had grown up there after two centuries of isolation. Then the forgotten outpost had consisted only of the primary phase of construction: the fused asteroids and mass generator that comprised the Maze. It had been a dark, humid labyrinth filled with insects, boiling chemical pools and an overworked populace ruled by a cult leader. Less than a month after contact, Federal forces had descended into the tunnels, intent upon liberating the common people from their Loviatar overlord. Federalists had anticipated a brief conflict fought remotely via synthetic drones. But the dark, magnetically charged tunnels that made up the Maze had disrupted Federalist equipment and communications. The intense gravity rendered projectile weapons useless. Soon fighting degenerated Just the precariousness of the station itself lent a kind of hardness to the people who called it home. Sisu Station whipped around the edge of an artificial black hole—a failed first attempt at igniting a synthetic star like Yuanxi. The citizens of all three sectors: the Maze, the Arc and the Drift shared a history of oppression, warfare and famine. Many people had endured hard times and survived in ways that didn’t bear scrutiny. Most didn’t want more trouble, but they’d hit hard if they felt disrespected.”
So during the war Lake had helped the Federalists and betrayed his former Boss. Now he is thinking that his past has come back back to bite him, and he goes to Maze to find some answers.
There is also a romance, but please note that while the romance is important, it is clearly a secondary storyline. Once again, I am not complaining – but if you want a lot of romance in your stories please it may not be for you. However, secondary or not, I thought the chemistry between the guys was strong, and it was a wise choice in a shorter story to write about a couple who had already been in love with each other for a long time.
You see, Lake and Aguillar had worked together in the police force for five years. Lake propositioned Aguillar, but Aguillar was married then and turned him down. Today Aguillar is no longer married, but they can’t spend time sorting out their non-relationship because Lake is too busy trying to figure out who killed Holly Ryan and who is trying to frame him and why. Eventually they do come together, but it takes time. I thought it was wonderful to read how the author lets us know how much these two want to be together without spending pages and pages on love talk.
Based on the blurb it should be clear that there are themes about prejudice and intolerance in the book. How successful were these themes in the execution? For me they were successful enough, but you guys decide.
What did not work for me was the resolution for the secondary villain; it just was not believable or satisfactory to me.
Grade: B+
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I also really liked this book. I would read more in this universe.
Kim me too definitely :).
Ginn is a favorite author in the Pacific NW and it is great to see her getting some well-deserved visibility here at DA! Thanks for the review. If you like interesting word-building, check out “The Irregulars” a fabulous anthology of interconnected stories (by Ginn, Astrid Amara, Josh Lanyon and Nicole Kimberling).
@nblibgirl: Ginn Hale’s works had been reviewed here for years now :-). Sunita and Janine reviewed “Rifter”, I reviewed “Champion of the scarlet wolf” and I am pretty sure but not 100 percent sure that Sunita reviewed “Irregulars” as well. I enjoyed “Irregulars” very much myself.
@Sirius: To my shame, I never properly reviewed Irregulars but I did put it on my Best of 2012 list and there’s some more discussion of it in the comment thread. It’s a great anthology, I agree. There are a couple of reviews of The Rifter, the first jointly by Janine and me and the second by me alone; they cover parts 1-7. Janine also reviewed Wicked Gentleman way back in the day. If you put “Ginn Hale” in the search box at the top of the page, you’ll get those reviews plus Sirius’s reviews of other of Hale’s books.
I’m reading this one right now and enjoying it a lot. As Sirius says, Hale makes every word count, and I am always impressed by how much worldbuilding she can do in a novella format.
@Sunita: Aha. I remembered there was something :). Thank you. I am so glad you are enjoying the story :).
I just finished this and agree with you, Sirius, that the secondary villain story didn’t really work; for me, both of the villains came out of nowhere in terms of the plot. I thought the romance was low-key but developed nicely, and the worldbuilding was really interesting. I’d probably give it a B/B-, but I’m a harsh grader these days so that’s basically a Recommended Read for me!
Sunita I am just happy you read m/m story and liked it well enough :-). You mean both villains did not work in terms of foreshadowing ? I am not the greatest judge of that – I mean I can see when it had been foreshadowed when I look back but usually if it makes sense when retold, I can be okay with that. Secondary villain did not work for me in terms of resolution – I can see a parallel which I think author was going for in terms of what happened to Lake in the past and how he decided to deal with secondary villain but it did not work for me. The reason why Lake did what he did was very specific and very sympathetic ( to me). The villain? Oh heck no and the end of their story arc was unsatisfactory for me.
Thanks Sirius and Sunita! Here is my Wicked Gentlemen review from nine years ago. That book deserves to be more widely read, though the title is a complete misnomer–neither of the heroes is wicked. Thanks to a DA commenter who mentioned it to me, I discovered Ginn Hale and Blind Eye Books at the same time, before either was widely known (Another Blind Eye Books author I loved in those days was Jesse Sandoval–though he only had two short stories at the time, they were marvelous. I wonder what happened to him?).
Nice review, BTW!
@Sirius: Good point on the parallel.
I would have liked more breadcrumbs that pointed toward the villain, rather than hints which could have been about anyone. Maybe I missed something, but …
SPOILER
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The villain’s relationship to the murdered girl seemed to come out of nowhere, but as I say, maybe I missed something? But saying her mother had lots of lovers didn’t feel like enough, and neither did the fact that the villain hated Lake. More pages explaining that relationship would have helped me. As for the secondary villain, s/he completely disappeared for most of the story and then reappeared, so I didn’t expect a role for that person at all.
Also, I forgot to say that the insect-centric world was a little creepy to me, but very clever.
Sunita no I don’t think you missed anything ! It makes sense – your complaint I mean. It is funny I just finished mm story which I liked well enough but it attempted to be a mystery as well . And the author pointed at group of people as suspects and eh I guess decided it’s enough without trying to point at specific villain ? So in that case yeah I picked on that of course but here I did not even realize that the clues for main villain were too general . For example he hated Lake was a big one for me when I looked back because besides those whom Lake betrayed before – who else hated him that we know of ? Now I wonder – do you think author may have sacrificed more detailed foreshadowing in favor of more intricate world building since the story is of the shortish length ?
Insect world yeah well – I liked the ingenuity and complexity but don’t really want to imagine some visuals you know ?
Thanks Janine ! “Wicked gentlemen” was my second ever m/m book and I really liked it too. Have not read Jesse Sandoval will check if Amazon has his stories.
@Sirius: Yes, I think you nailed it. The worldbuilding took up a lot of the word count (necessarily, because it’s complicated and the backstory of the characters is important to the plot), and so the mystery wasn’t as well developed as it needed to be, in my opinion. Retrospectively the main villain makes sense, but I didn’t even consider him because I didn’t see a connection between the present and the past, and the past was what was driving the murder. With the secondary villain I wanted some kind of on-page exchange between Lake and them, given the relationship. I understand why Lake did what he did, and the last few pages were touching, but again, I think another 20% in length would have helped a lot. I’m a big fan of tight writing and shorter stories, but there was just too much going on here for everything to get its due.
@Sirius: The Jesse Sandoval stories were published in the two Tangle anthologies, Tangle, sometimes also called Tangle XY (it is an anthology of m/m stories), and Tangle Girls (an f/f anthology). They are shorts, not novellas. That being said both anthologies have some other good stories in them and in the case of Tangle, there’s a Ginn Hale novella, Feral Machines, included in there too.
ETA: Nicole Kimberling is the editor of both anthos, so if you search Amazon books under her name they should come up.
@Janine: I read first Tangle but don’t remember his stories at all. Hmm, will reread.
I reviewed “Feral Machines” here too :).
@Sirius: There was just one story in each of the anthologies. The one you would have read would have been “Los Conversos” which is just beautifully written. There is a vivid, almost hallucinatory quality to his writing that had me mesmerized.