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The Review:  Now that’s an intriguing blurb, isn’t it? Full to the brim with potential.  A cop ending up owing his life to the criminal he’s hunted forever – enemies to lovers! A notorious criminal turning out to be some kind of mysterious guardian angel from outer space – cloak-and-dagger intrigue! A man-made satellite orbiting Earth, populated with intergalactic peacekeepers – fantastic technologies! Foreign worlds! Aliens? Please let there be Aliens! And a man facing a life-altering choice between the man he loves and the job he’s dedicated to- warring loyalties! Enormous internal conflict! Heartbreak and Romance with a capital R!

Some of those tropes happen to be personal favorites of mine, and when I saw them combined in one, and in such a relatively short story, I couldn’t wait to see what would come out of such an intriguing and ambitioned mix.

Short answer?

A basic guy-meets-guy that was so bland and unexciting reading it almost put me to sleep.

Longer answer? Okay.

So here we are at the beginning of the story in the underground parking lot of Riker’s apartment. He comes home and sees Yates’s car there, and while he’s still wondering about it (and the reader learns the barest necessities about how Cop Riker hunted Criminal Yates for years), bullets start to fly from all directions. Riker is hit, Yates comes running to his aide, they realize they can’t get out, Yates announces he’ll take Riker for a trip and -blip-they’re both in what seems to be some kind of hospital where a doctor named Noel heals the bullet wound in Riker’s shoulder with a single touch.

So far, so good. But from then on, the story turned strange.

First, while the healer is still working on him, Riker gets to meet a little girl and her mother who invite Yates to a party. Then the two men sit down for a coffee and, after a lackdaisical explanation from Yates (whose real name is Yana, apparently) about where they are, they calmly start discussing a case Riker worked at. Next, a young man called Jimmy pops in, repeats the party invitation, gives Riker the hairy eyeball and disappears again. Then both men decide they are tired and need to sleep, retire to their respective rooms and do just that.

While I wondered a bit how easily the supposedly seasoned, wary law enforcer Riker went with everything his supposedly long-time criminal adversary suggested, I accepted it at first because I figured Riker was a) wounded and b) understandably totally shell-shocked.
But Riker’s casual acceptance of everything went on and on, increasingly bothering me as I, the reader, started wanting answers even though Riker seemed contented with the tidbits Yates threw him.  Whatever Riker asked, Yates just went like, ‘It’s just as it is, can’t tell you more’ and Riker was like, ‘okay, and what’s for lunch?’ (literally, a lot of page space was deigned to the characters’ diet).
There were longish passages of detailed, sometimes repetitive, descriptions of environment and day-to-day activities. A big part of the dialogue consisted of nice, polite conversation between Riker and several inhabitants of the space ship, namely Evie, a little girl who insisted on being Yates’/Yana’s fiancé (she was actually the most sympathetic character in the story, though I couldn’t figure out her role except for being cute) The rest of the cast, including the main characters, remained sketched and shadowy. There was especially nothing about Riker’s past, what motivated him, what made him the good cop we’re told he is.

The romance developed reasonably slowly, but the reader doesn’t actually get to see the relationship build. Yates is away a lot on his mysterious assignments, and the falling in love mostly happens in Riker’s head. Yates/ Yana seems to have always admired Riker from afar, if unrequited for their former antagonism (though I couldn’t find a hint on what, exactly, drew him to the cop who hunted him.) Riker’s shift from wary to accepting to fond to loving went just smoothly. Each and every obstacle they encountered, internal or outwardly, conveniently dissolved into thin air.

The plot had lots of good ideas, but often got boggled down in details and minor matters. Riker’s stay on the spaceship resembled more some kind of all-inclusive luxury cruise where everybody was mostly interested in partying. Jimmy, who turned out to be Yates’ jealous wannabe boyfriend, would’ve made a great adversary, but he was mostly just being a bitch, and once his jealousy got out of hand, he was dealt with off-page. Same with the criminal mastermind behind the shootout that placed Riker into the spaceship in the first place; while the criminal case plot idea in and of itself wasn’t half bad, everything ‘was dealt with’, and Riker (just as a reminder: he’s a seasoned cop!) didn’t even try to get to the bottom of things. Come to think of it, Riker’s easy acceptance of everything Yates served him wasn’t so strange, given his Captain was just the same. Whenever Riker wanted to skip work, his captain swallowed any lame excuse he came up with, and in the end, Riker seemed just expendable as a cop, and more important, being a cop wasn’t as important to Riker as the blurb made it sound, apparently. Another issue conveniently dispensed with.

There were so many brilliant ideas in the setting, but it was as underdeveloped as the characters. The spaceship’s inhabitants, a peaceful utopia without money where everybody makes their contribution for the public good and nobody suffers any want, how does their society work? How did they arrive at that point, and are they human or Aliens? Who assigned them to be the “Keepers” of the earth and what, exactly, entails this? Who invented the technology they use? At one point, Riker got to meet the Elders, the leaders of Yates’ people, and I thought “Ha! Now I’m going to get my answers!” But what happened? Ten minutes of pleasant smalltalk between Riker and three monk-like old geezers, alongside the above mentioned lines, and that was it.

Perhaps some of my questions are going to be answered in the next books, as this one is apparently the first in a series. But by the end, I just wasn’t interested enough anymore to care.

The cover, though, is gorgeous.