Ellora’s Cave, $5.99, ISBN 978-1419914157
Sci-fi Erotica, 2008

There is an edition of Imperfect Judgment available out there, published independently after Ellora’s Cave went under, under the name Janet Miller. I’m not sure whether that edition had been revised, expanded, shrunk, et cetera, because I’ve bought and am reviewing the Ellora’s Cave edition.

Considering my previous experiences with Cricket Starr’s works, I have to say that I am pleasantly surprised by all of this. Our hero, Diam, whose notable personality is that he has the biggest third leg in his nomadic tribe—maybe they all had a measuring contest, I don’t know, or he just believes all the lies told to him by the women he’d slept with—is aggrieved because his sister has caught an apparently incurable disease that has stricken so many people in his neighborhood. After sexually servicing the local oracle lady—erotic romance, so you shouldn’t even ask—as payment, he is given… an answer, I guess, although I suspect that scene is just set up so that readers get a free sexy scene thrown in for the money they are giving this publisher and the author.

Gallia is a planet that has received an influx of folks from distant planets—the colonists—and Diam’s people blame the colonists for introducing the disease. Diam considers finding a way to drive the colonists away, because I guess diseases magically disappear once that you’ve stomped the original carrier into pulp, until he finds his way, ahem, into our heroine Justina, a doctor with the colonists. We all know that magical things happen once a romance heroine gets an infusion of true love in her honey pot, and we soon learn that the colonists have this remarkable thing called vaccine. I can hear some people grumbling about vaccine propaganda already, heh.

I have my doubts about some of the science in this story, but then again, I don’t read an Ellora’s Cave story for high-end sci-fi stuff. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m here for the boinking, and this one delivers some decent, occasionally purple, stuff of that nature that may please folks that still believe that Dongalar, er, Jondalar is the paragon of all donkey kong heroes.  Indeed, one can draw some loose parallels here, from Diam’s endowment to how, basically, this story is about a heroine that shows the hero great stuff about the world and gets a super-sized reward from him in turn.

Diam is a pretty okay hero, as is Justina in the sense that while there is nothing about them that stands out in a remarkable manner, there isn’t anything awful about them either. They are hot people that shag hard and have decent chemistry between them, and in a way, that’s all that matters.

So while Imperfect Judgment is far from great, much less amazing, I judge it perfectly fine if one is looking for some quick, easy, and sexy read. I’ve had fun, at least. Just don’t think too hard about things in this story, and nobody will get hurt.