A tense, heart-racing bounty-hunter space adventure to thrill 365 Days fans
This suspenseful space adventure is about greed, betrayal, and colonial warfare with magical weaponry. Inventive and intriguing, Hunting the Heiress uses sex and sophisticated space travel to tell Reyne’s story: A morally-gray hero’s journey from defeated orphan just following orders, to rebel soldier standing up to fight the system. But the book’s title is painfully accurate, as readers are constantly aware that heiress Kendra is being hunted, and the stress level is heightened accordingly.
Hunting the Heiress opens with tyrannical ruler Mordrick proudly surveying the massacre he orchestrated to end an enemy kingdom’s royal bloodline, enabling him to colonize it. He’s an exceptional, detestable, disgust-worthy villain: arrogant and conniving, casually cruel, with a reputation for deranged acts of violence. The “unmistakeable sadistic gleam” in his eyes strikes readers with a chill, making everything inside you curdle. The news that there may be one surviving enemy royal (a princess secretly imprisoned somewhere in outer space) thrills him: “a female pawn in his grand scheme only fueling his insidious ambitions.” He immediately sends for his nephew Reyne.
Twenty-eight year-old Reyne is a bounty-hunter anointed by the royal court to bring criminals to face their punishment. Mordrick offers him thousands of water barrels (which Reyne has been purchasing in secret, donating them to a desert community suffering under his uncle’s rations) to find Princess Kendra. His only lead is a photo from five years ago: a sixteen-year-old girl with red hair (considered cursed in her kingdom) on the day her father sold her in exchange for a weapon. Rumors say the princess is on a spaceship so untraceable that authorities gave up searching for it. Now run by convicts and “opportunistic pirates” for smuggling, the ship has been known to pick up stranded vessels that ask for a tow, “for a hefty fee of course,” so Reyne gets to work setting that up…
Kendra’s life onboard this secret spaceship “spared me from [the] horrid fate” of being sold into an emperor’s harem. Now twenty-one years old, she is the found-family little sister to a band of rebels who play wildly competitive games and lovingly bicker every chance they get. When Reyne’s ship signals distress, they welcome him on board. He fools them at first, using sleazy charm to flirt with Kendra, frighteningly comfortable roaming his hands over the young woman’s body and manipulating her with ease. But his act falls flat when Kendra’s father-figure Odin erupts with rage at the sight of Reyne. The men refuse to explain their history, but Kendra understands enough to know that Reyne has come to capture her for Mordrick.
She reacts quickly in defense, but Reyne is stronger and faster—forcefully grabbing Kendra’s hair, choking her when she accuses him of blindly following his uncle’s orders, throwing her around while threatening to hurt her more, and injecting her with a toxin. Author Kathleen Beatty’s writing is immersive and impossible to look away from, but instead of heart-racing sensuality, Hunting the Heiress’s sharp, captivating prose had cortisol rushing through my body, feeling tormented by Reyne’s reckless desires. I felt constant, genuine terror on Kendra’s behalf.
“Everything came back to Kendra in an overwhelming rush—the horrid massage of her family, her brutal abduction and being drugged. Kendra tugged at her shackled wrist. Hate was too mild of a word to describe how she felt about Reyne—her merciless vile captor.”
Reyne’s spaceship runs out of fuel (for real this time) on the journey back to Mordrick, crash landing in an abandoned forest. With limited supplies and no survival skills, Kendra must rely on Reyne to guide them back to civilization. She trembles at the realization that “Reyne was now both captor and savior.”
The wilderness trek creates opportunities for sizzling-hot outdoor sex, during which Reyne’s unsettling narration distracts from even the steamiest scenes: He repeatedly announces that “Kendra’s innocence was an aphrodisiac,” her inexperience igniting his desperation to “brand” and “mark” Kendra as his—this is not inherently unsexy! It’s unenjoyable because Reyne’s attraction to Kendra began with his shameless fantasizing about the girl in the old photograph and doesn’t progress past that. We feel every beat of Reyne’s hunt, hyperaware that Kendra is prey. We’re expected to overlook his initial attraction to a teenager, while she is held at a distance from the reader. But by maintaining this view of Kendra as more of a vessel for Reyne’s fetishes and misguided acts of heroism, Hunting the Heiress fails to breathe fully believable life into their relationship dynamic.
With stunning, evocative phrases like “Harmonious gasps of horror spread like wildfire, then panic set in,” and dazzling worldbuilding that I was excited to explore, this story left me wanting more: about Kendra’s botanical skills, the mystical moonstones’ behavior, and the divinely-appointed archivist creatures. I found the storyline following Odin and Reyne’s history most engaging and satisfying. The shocking, heart-wrenching twists—from devastating reveal to enlightening redemption—made my heart soar and my eyes well up with emotion.
Hunting the Heiress’s representation of enslavement does not feel reflective of the severity and insidious nature of the practice. This extends into Reyne’s perspective. For example: a decade into what he considers a friendship with his child slave, he still has no insight into her reality or the harmful cycles he perpetuates. Because he has familiar, longstanding relationships with working-class people wherever he travels, this behavior reads as willful ignorance. Readers should expect scenes featuring torture, mutilation, alcohol reliance, and sexual violence. For all its scientific and galactic advancements, Hunting the Heiress’s women are still confined largely to roles as royal slaves, sex workers, and rape victims.
Hunting the Heiress successfully explores the lengths men will go to chase their greed, the crushing impact of empires on its people, and the enduring power of rebel movements. Readers who love slice-of-life stories will appreciate the convict crew’s scenes in space, while fans of the erotic abduction movie 365 Days will be thrilled by the heat and kink in Reyne and Kendra’s interactions.
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