Linnea Sinclair has been writing for a while, though you may not have seen her books. She was initially published by a smaller press publisher (also in ebooks) and wrote under another name – Megan Sybil Baker. Realizing her potential, Bantam has reissued some of her earlier books and signed her up for some new ones. It’s all good.

For new readers, An Accidental Goddess is a great reissue to start with. Captain Gillaine (Gillie) Davre wakes up and finds she and her intelligent space ship have somehow traveled 342 years into the future. As if that weren’t fantastic enough, she’s now worshiped as a goddess. Not a bad gig if you can get it, huh? Well, not so much. Gillie has no interest in being anything but what she is. Her biggest goal is to get her ship repaired and to leave the Cirrus One space station before anyone recognizes her. Her plans go awry when she meets the commander of the station and realizes that old enemies are still endangering the Khalarans.

Admiral “Mack” Makarian doesn’t know what to make of the woman who has landed on his space station. His biggest priority is getting the station organized and running smoothly. Captain Davre claims to be a pilot just making her way between worlds but something doesn’t ring true about her story. Who attacked her ship and how did she end up in the rift? Mack suspects she’s a smuggler but he can’t prove it. One thing he is sure of, she’s not going anywhere until he knows who and what she is. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing considering how he’s beginning to feel about her.

Mack is a great hero. He’s skeptical of Gillie and her motives for being on his space station so his attraction to her could have been written as an “I hate you, let’s have sex” romance. It isn’t. Mack wants her sexually but he doesn’t act on those feelings until he’s pretty sure that whatever Gillie is isn’t going to hurt his station or the people on it. In short, he acts like a professional with his feelings tied up in knots.

Gillie is strong enough to be a foil for Mack, but I did wish the “secret” of who she is hadn’t dragged on for quite so long. Trying to figure out how to tell the man you are coming to care for that you’re a goddess is tough, I get that. The problem is that Gillie makes the telling like pulling off a Band-Aid one millimeter at a time. She’s afraid that Mack won’t be able to love her as a woman if he knows who she is. That makes sense. But it also makes sense that once he knows “all” the author has a terrific romantic conflict to resolve. Because of the pacing of the reveal, the romantic climax is given backseat to the external conflict. It’s the one time, and a very crucial one at that, that the balance between romance and science fiction is lost.

Ms. Sinclair’s book is marked as Science Fiction on the spine and that’s a misnomer. In the Star Trek like universe Ms. Sinclair has created, space travel happens without much effort and the rest of the technology is just there. No complicated discussion of how ships fly through space or how a station in deep space manages. And that’s actually a good thing. The beauty of Star Trek and its television descendents was that the writers could tell good people stories because they weren’t spending all their time making us believe in the technology. If they had tried to get us to understand the science of a transporter, for instance, our faith would have disappeared. Same goes here. Though the universe she creates is light on explanation, there is plenty of time devoted to the relationship and romance. So though hard-core SF readers would scoff at the wallpaper universe, this romance reader appreciated it as the backdrop for an action packed romance.

It’s been a while, but I think I have a couple of the author’s other earlier works in my tbr piles somewhere. I’ll have to do some digging and see if they measure up to this one. I’ll definitely be on the lookout for her new books.