The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses

It seems to me that the books in this series should be read more closely together than they are published. This one featured the effects of what happened in the first one as an important aspect of the story but I didn't remember the details very well. I liked how Mossa's and Pleiti's relationship has grown over the course of the books. We also get to explore another platform and its quirks more closely. The plot is also linked to the way people are living on Giant, like the first two, and I really like that about the series.

I appreciate that this one had an even more self-sufficient Pleiti, as well as exploring Mossa's fallibility. (I swear I'm not anti-Mossa, I just prefer the "two complementary equals helping people together" dynamic to the "superhuman investigator with sheltered everywoman sidekick" dynamic.)

This one felt more fast-paced and dynamic to me than Imposition, although I suspect that an objective examination would probably reveal that there isn't a significant difference.

I wonder sometimes if too high expectations make me more likely to be disappointed in a book. I feel like the Mossa and Pleiti series should be my jam: it's lesbian scifi detective fiction set on an Oxford-esque Jupiter space habitats. This one was pretty good, but the first book is still my favorite.

The details of the mystery in this book are the most solid of the trilogy, and (in some ways) I like Pleiti getting a chance to try to do some investigating on her own. Unfortunately, the romance angle suffers from acute "please just talk to each other" syndrome where they each worry on their own about what the other is thinking and feeling.

This is also maybe a minor and petty opinion, but it felt like this book over-did loan words from other languages; arguably, in universe this could be part of the academic study of past earth so I can give it a little bit of a pass. However, it feels like a :chart_with_upwards_trend: from the first book which had none (to my poor memory), to the second book with a few, and this third book where it was so frequent as to almost become jarring. I could believe in the adoption of words like chisme or pues or klopt, but ... chiacchierare? chismoseando?