Oh Diane Duane let me love you. (Also Peter Morwood! I went specifically looking for their collaborations, and this did not disappoint.)

This is so full of tasty metafictiony jokes and references and fondness for people being dorks (subjects of dorkery include but are not limited to: historical TV shows, spacesuits, archeology, and food) that I may need a good dose of Lacan to clear my palate. No, wait. I wish every book were this fun. I wish every book had this kind of happiness at its core.

The pacing is a little off — I feel like the resolution could have used another....twenty pages, maybe? I can't quite put my finger on it, but for a story which handles the frustrations of its central characters as connected to their motivating bureaucracy, the plot wraps up remarkably quickly. And I am not thrilled that every single character with a precisely delineated Earth-based origin is from the UK (the Midlands, Scotland, and Wales, and there may be one or two others). And please let the word "inscrutable" be stricken from every single scene that an Asian character appears in, in every book, ever. (This happens only once, to Duane & Morwood's credit, but it was not their finest moment.)

Basically: this is a character-based book. The infodumps from the earlier Space Cops books — which I've not read — are handled well, the plot is a little ridiculous and contrived, but Joss and Evan are AWESOME. (I'm a little sad that David, the Asian guy who runs Sichuan, the awesome-sounding restaurant — if that is based on a real place, as I suspect it is, I want to know where — never turns up again after he is so badass, and I would've loved to see Mary Helen be a little more physical in the final fight, but whatever.) I love how much they like each other. I love that they have injokes and things they need to explain to each other and I love they protect each other and I love they understand that the other is a person for whom they don't get to make decisions. I honestly thought they were dating in the first few chapters, and I would have taken odds of them doing so by the end of the book. Thankfully, this is why we have Yuletide.

(Diane, seriously, they are AWESOME. I love them.) ( )