Wen Spencer’s Alien Taste

Last September, I reviewed [tag]Wen Spencer[/tag]’s Tinker, a fantasy novel. This summer I picked up WO’s copy of [tag]Alien Taste[/tag], Spencer’s second novel.

She’s grown a decent amount as a writer, in my opinion. Gone is the awkwardly-inserted sex and the overpowered main character. [tag]Ukiah Oregon[/tag], the main character in [tag]Tinker[/tag], does a good job of having limitations and not having sudden personality changes.

This book is really a lot of fun if you’re looking for some light reading. It’s not a book that induces a lot of finger-biting over what’s going to happen next, but the characters are fun and do evoke sympathetic reactions.

Spencer has evidently turned this plotline into a series of books about Ukiah. I have no idea what the subsequent books would contain, as, much like Tinker, I felt the big bad guy had been vanquished and the characters “completed” by the end of this novel.

That said, Ukiah and Max (and company) are such likeable characters that I can put aside my confusion and place the next book on order. The circumstances and setting of Alien Taste–two private investigators, one of which is a master tracker–have enough potential for other fun things to happen that I wouldn’t mind following Ukiah around for a while.