What do you think?
Rate this book
Star Gems
Quentin never wanted to be a hero. But when an interstellar syndicate finds his haul of star gems, he’s thrust into a world of dangerous secrets, seductive allies, and deadly foes.
From his space-boat, harvesting diamonds, to the underbelly of star systems, Quintin fights to survive, learning that power comes with a price. Along the way, he’s joined by powerful women, each with her own skills and desires, all tied to his fate. Together, they must navigate the ruthless syndicate, ancient portal tech, and a galaxy full of enemies.
But betrayal is everywhere—and sometimes, the greatest danger comes from within.
Fast ships, fierce battles, and sizzling chemistry—Quintin’s story isn’t just a fight for survival; it’s a fight to claim his place in the stars.
Content This book is intended for mature audiences, 18+, who tend to be straight men, and features scintillating encounters between male and female characters, all set against the backdrop of an epic interstellar journey.
From his space-boat, harvesting diamonds, to the underbelly of star systems, Quintin fights to survive, learning that power comes with a price. Along the way, he’s joined by powerful women, each with her own skills and desires, all tied to his fate. Together, they must navigate the ruthless syndicate, ancient portal tech, and a galaxy full of enemies.
But betrayal is everywhere—and sometimes, the greatest danger comes from within.
Fast ships, fierce battles, and sizzling chemistry—Quintin’s story isn’t just a fight for survival; it’s a fight to claim his place in the stars.
Content This book is intended for mature audiences, 18+, who tend to be straight men, and features scintillating encounters between male and female characters, all set against the backdrop of an epic interstellar journey.
421 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 15, 2024
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 4, 2026
This is just a mess. After struggling to finish the first book I don't think I could even explain what it's about with any real degree of confidence. The blurb only seems to describe the book in a very remote fashion, and there is no harem (yet).
Writing quality is fairly poor, even for self-published KU. The author can't seem to decide on American or British English. There are not as many grammatical errors and mishaps as normal for the genre, but there are still quite a few: singular-plural mismatches, tense shifts in sentences (with particular problems around the past and past perfect), incorrect punctuation (including occasional em-dashes where other punctuation is required), incorrectly anchored pronouns, nouns used where verbs are required, dangling participles, incorrect connectors, inconsistent invented adjectives, prose attached to the wrong dialogue, dialogue from multiple speakers in a single paragraph, and so on. But there are more serious semantic problems.
The worst of these problems is consistency. The prose feels disconnected in places, becoming almost incoherent at times, as if the author had trouble maintaining context. In one section, a character is tackled to the ground and feels a pain in his ribs in one sentence, then regains consciousness in the next, with no explanation as to how a pain in his ribs caused him to lose consciousness. He's left on the floor, but then someone pushes him and he stumbles, from the floor? And then it's suddenly "days turn into weeks", but the scene continues as if no time has elapsed. Later, he's in a wheelchair in one sentence, then the next says he's lying on a bed.
There's no consistent timeline. The same revelations are made multiple times, as if they weren't already known. Events contradict themselves and descriptions are sometimes repeated, with or without small changes in the details. Environments don't logically and consistently affect characters within them. The author fails to track actions across multiple people, made worse by poor pronoun anchoring. Scene breaks happen with no warning or explanation and some chapters seem to have no relationship with those before them, as if the author knows what she wants to happen next in the plot, but not how to get there in a logical manner.
The main character is all over the place. Even within one personality, his motivations and decisions make no sense. He kills vehicle operators and steals their vehicles, and in one scene he's perfectly happy to kill a whole building full of innocent people including children, and then a couple of scenes later he tries to buy a small boat and is relieved he doesn't have to kill the owner. He didn't care about any of the other people he killed, so why the change? It's not explained.
There is just no way to ignore some of the contradictions and complete logical failures. The main character has pale skin and contemplates removing his t-shirt to cool down, but says he can't or he'll get sunburned. Then the very next paragraph he removes the t-shirt and ties it around his head to hide his pale skin from people following him. What?! So he's now fine with the sunburn, AND somehow showing more of his pale skin is going to hide it from people. How does that make sense?
It really needs a continuity edit. Occasional scenes by themselves are OK, but it just doesn't hold together properly as a complete story, making the plot much harder to follow than it should be.
The choppiness and lack of clear descriptions makes this problem even worse. The author is presumably aiming for fast-flowing modern prose, but instead there is too little attention paid to anything, so nothing is memorable. The seemingly countless side characters with complicated names feel like carbon copies, and both characters and locations are all interchangeable because none of them are distinguishable. There's no reason for the female characters to be with the male main character in the first place, and certainly no reason for them to stick around. The author takes a shotgun approach to everything, blasting far and wide in the hopes of hitting something good, but nothing has any depth. It makes it very hard to care about anyone or anything.
Technical descriptions and technology are fairly weak and inconsistent, feeling like the author wants it to be hard SF, but can only write soft. There is weird and inconsistent naming and capitalisation of invented-technology nouns that don't have any reason to be proper nouns. The addition of weird magic just makes it even more confusing and inconsistent. If Anna can do what she can do in some scenes, why can't she do it all the time? She alternates between god-power and gimp at the whim of the plot. There's no logical depth to most of the technology; it's just cool ideas underpinned by nothing, or nonsense. Fictional creations are mixed with real-life existence in a way that doesn't make sense, either.
Some adjectives and adverbs are used in ways that tend to contradict their meaning, such as "momentarily" for actions that take quite some time.
Dialogue feels stilted and unnatural at times, being abnormally formal in casual conversations and frequently using too few of the contractions common to everyday speech. There are a couple of sections where the dialogue directly contradicts itself or the prose. And, ironically, the prose sometimes feels less formal than the dialogue.
There are a few explicit intimate scenes -- the bread and butter of the harem genre -- but they're filled with the same contradictions as the rest of the book, and seem to have mostly been inserted as an afterthought, making little sense in the narrative flow. They're brief, poorly described, and have cringe-worthy dirty talk in them, too.
Overall I found this really disappointing. I had intended to read all six books in the series, but had to force myself to finish just the first book. There are occasional good ideas here, but the implementation is very poor. It requires considerable editing focused on continuity and consistency, but even then I'm not sure I would recommend it. From an author who claims to have been writing SF for almost a decade, this really should be much better than it is.
Writing quality is fairly poor, even for self-published KU. The author can't seem to decide on American or British English. There are not as many grammatical errors and mishaps as normal for the genre, but there are still quite a few: singular-plural mismatches, tense shifts in sentences (with particular problems around the past and past perfect), incorrect punctuation (including occasional em-dashes where other punctuation is required), incorrectly anchored pronouns, nouns used where verbs are required, dangling participles, incorrect connectors, inconsistent invented adjectives, prose attached to the wrong dialogue, dialogue from multiple speakers in a single paragraph, and so on. But there are more serious semantic problems.
The worst of these problems is consistency. The prose feels disconnected in places, becoming almost incoherent at times, as if the author had trouble maintaining context. In one section, a character is tackled to the ground and feels a pain in his ribs in one sentence, then regains consciousness in the next, with no explanation as to how a pain in his ribs caused him to lose consciousness. He's left on the floor, but then someone pushes him and he stumbles, from the floor? And then it's suddenly "days turn into weeks", but the scene continues as if no time has elapsed. Later, he's in a wheelchair in one sentence, then the next says he's lying on a bed.
There's no consistent timeline. The same revelations are made multiple times, as if they weren't already known. Events contradict themselves and descriptions are sometimes repeated, with or without small changes in the details. Environments don't logically and consistently affect characters within them. The author fails to track actions across multiple people, made worse by poor pronoun anchoring. Scene breaks happen with no warning or explanation and some chapters seem to have no relationship with those before them, as if the author knows what she wants to happen next in the plot, but not how to get there in a logical manner.
The main character is all over the place. Even within one personality, his motivations and decisions make no sense. He kills vehicle operators and steals their vehicles, and in one scene he's perfectly happy to kill a whole building full of innocent people including children, and then a couple of scenes later he tries to buy a small boat and is relieved he doesn't have to kill the owner. He didn't care about any of the other people he killed, so why the change? It's not explained.
There is just no way to ignore some of the contradictions and complete logical failures. The main character has pale skin and contemplates removing his t-shirt to cool down, but says he can't or he'll get sunburned. Then the very next paragraph he removes the t-shirt and ties it around his head to hide his pale skin from people following him. What?! So he's now fine with the sunburn, AND somehow showing more of his pale skin is going to hide it from people. How does that make sense?
It really needs a continuity edit. Occasional scenes by themselves are OK, but it just doesn't hold together properly as a complete story, making the plot much harder to follow than it should be.
The choppiness and lack of clear descriptions makes this problem even worse. The author is presumably aiming for fast-flowing modern prose, but instead there is too little attention paid to anything, so nothing is memorable. The seemingly countless side characters with complicated names feel like carbon copies, and both characters and locations are all interchangeable because none of them are distinguishable. There's no reason for the female characters to be with the male main character in the first place, and certainly no reason for them to stick around. The author takes a shotgun approach to everything, blasting far and wide in the hopes of hitting something good, but nothing has any depth. It makes it very hard to care about anyone or anything.
Technical descriptions and technology are fairly weak and inconsistent, feeling like the author wants it to be hard SF, but can only write soft. There is weird and inconsistent naming and capitalisation of invented-technology nouns that don't have any reason to be proper nouns. The addition of weird magic just makes it even more confusing and inconsistent. If Anna can do what she can do in some scenes, why can't she do it all the time? She alternates between god-power and gimp at the whim of the plot. There's no logical depth to most of the technology; it's just cool ideas underpinned by nothing, or nonsense. Fictional creations are mixed with real-life existence in a way that doesn't make sense, either.
Some adjectives and adverbs are used in ways that tend to contradict their meaning, such as "momentarily" for actions that take quite some time.
Dialogue feels stilted and unnatural at times, being abnormally formal in casual conversations and frequently using too few of the contractions common to everyday speech. There are a couple of sections where the dialogue directly contradicts itself or the prose. And, ironically, the prose sometimes feels less formal than the dialogue.
There are a few explicit intimate scenes -- the bread and butter of the harem genre -- but they're filled with the same contradictions as the rest of the book, and seem to have mostly been inserted as an afterthought, making little sense in the narrative flow. They're brief, poorly described, and have cringe-worthy dirty talk in them, too.
Overall I found this really disappointing. I had intended to read all six books in the series, but had to force myself to finish just the first book. There are occasional good ideas here, but the implementation is very poor. It requires considerable editing focused on continuity and consistency, but even then I'm not sure I would recommend it. From an author who claims to have been writing SF for almost a decade, this really should be much better than it is.
March 21, 2026
I read 95% of the first book. Oh boy. The main character Quintin, spends more of the first book kidnapped or unconscious than he does in autonomy of his body. The main villain gets more non-fade to black sex scenes than the MC does. The MC spends most of the book wanting to go back to his wife and kids and has not even the headspace to think of a harem. I have yet to find the first harem member this far into the first book.
Also from a story structure point of view, the author randomly throws space magic and Space Wizards into the storyline for a few chapters and then decides against that and deus ex machina's the whole thing. Why, because he needs the MC to have "backstory?" Uncertain. I really wanted to like the book, but it doesn't fit the harem definition by 90% of the first book, and I feel exhausted watching the MC bounce around from kick to fall. It is terrible. The Fugative has a better plotline and was at least expected from start to finish.
Also from a story structure point of view, the author randomly throws space magic and Space Wizards into the storyline for a few chapters and then decides against that and deus ex machina's the whole thing. Why, because he needs the MC to have "backstory?" Uncertain. I really wanted to like the book, but it doesn't fit the harem definition by 90% of the first book, and I feel exhausted watching the MC bounce around from kick to fall. It is terrible. The Fugative has a better plotline and was at least expected from start to finish.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews