Chaos Reigning: A Novel

Three and a half stars. This series started out promisingly but I liked each book successively less and this felt a bit too rinse and repeat for me. Yet another daughter of House Hasenberg, Catarina von Hasenberg, has special abilities which she too hides from the world under a facade of a vapid socialite. Cat maneuvers to get herself invited to a rival House's house party so that she can spy on them and find evidence of their involvement in her brother's kidnapping. Because even her family believe that Cat is as flighty as she pretends, her sister Ada insists she takes two bodyguards with her, and because bodyguards can't be with her 24/7 she insists that Cat pretends that one bodyguard, Alex, is her significant other. What starts out as pretense quickly becomes more real, especially when Alex seems unfazed when Cat inadvertently uses her full strength. Then there's an attempt on Cat's life which is quickly followed by an all-out attack on the High Houses and their heirs. Cat is the only one (of course she is) who can get back to earth and save the galaxy from something far worse than the HIgh Houses. So this starts a bit like a space Downton Abbey, complete with formalwear for dinner and afternoon tea. Then it becomes more of a space opera with chases and battlecruisers and secret weapons stores. But even then it was Cat and her team are attacked and escape, go to a secret store, get attacked and escape yadda, yadda, yadda. How is it that the von Hasenberg sisters one seem to be targets for abuse of various kinds and two seem to be magnets for super soldiers? Overall, I felt not only that had I read this book before but also that within this book it was repetitive and I just struggled to finish it. Don't get me wrong, this series is still great fun but it fell from the promising start to an okay finish.