I was clearly not the target audience for this book. But I could not have known that because both the blurb and the opening hook were misleading. I thought the book was a “SciFi Mystery Conspiracy about the survival of humanity, with ethical and moral choices”, while in reality it was a “SciFi Romance with erotic elements”.
And to be frank, it wasn’t very good. The characters were bland, only three had any kind of personality, and the romantic interest was just too perfect. The aliens were boring, and we didn’t get any good description of them (despite being practically up in their faces). Everyone always instantly came to the correct conclusion, they just happened to always guess the right answer, and there were no disagreements or arguments. The “big reveals” weren’t that surprising, while the actual big reveals were haphazardly thrown into random paragraphs with no buildup or reactions. I never really got a feeling for what the current goal was, so I never got invested in the characters doing stuff.
There were also a lot of strange editing choices, like the paragraph order; I would like to know about the deadly gas -before- you tried to make me feel like the characters were in danger. There were exposition dumps/backstory right in the middle of tense moments, completely ruining the tension. A general lack of description of relevant things, so I couldn't get a clear picture of what was going on, or how something works. I need to know what a character can and cannot do, or there'll be no tension. But the exact opposite was also true: Detailed description of irrelevant things, like exactly who sit next to who around a table. The action scenes were confusing, I had no idea what was going on, and some scenes were skipped with a single sentence “He killed the three men”. And there were a lot of instantly skipping to the next scene without transitions, causing confusion and a feeling of teleportation.
It felt like I was reading a draft for a -movie-, complete with jump cuts, and not a published book.
If I have to say something positive about this book, I’d say the premise was interesting (too bad the story didn’t deliver). I liked the worldbuilding with the Domes and the Underworld, and I felt like it had potential. Oh, and the erotic sex scenes were actually well written, but that’s about it.
I know that this is the first book in a trilogy, and the story might evolve over the next two books, but I won’t find out, because I will not be reading anything else in this series.