![Review – Full Speed to a Crash Landing [Beth Revis]](https://breathesbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/g6m9mt5q9wguebfwnejlnwzzg8vz.jpg "Review – Full Speed to a Crash Landing [Beth Revis]")
Full Speed to a Crash Landing
by Beth Revis
Genres: Romance, Science FictionPages: 181
Series: Chaotic Orbits #1
Rating:
Synopsis:Ada Lamarr may have gotten to the spaceship wreck first, but looter’s rights won’t get her far when she’s got a hole in the side of her ship and her spacesuit is almost out of air. Fortunately for her, help arrives in the form of a government salvage crew—and while they reluctantly rescue her from certain death, they are not pleased to have an unexpected passenger along on their classified mission.
But Ada doesn’t care—all that matters to her is enjoying their fine food and sweet, sweet oxygen—until Rian White, the government agent in charge, starts to suspect that there’s more to Ada than meets the eye. He’s not wrong—but he’s so pretty that Ada is perfectly happy to keep him paying attention to her—at least until she can complete the job she was sent to pull off. But as quick as Ada is, Rian might be quicker—and she may not be entirely sure who’s manipulating who until it’s too late…
Beth Revis’ Full Speed to a Crash Landing is a fun sci-fi novella with more than a touch of romance potential, though that’s complicated by the fact that the main character is definitely an unreliable narrator; she tells us as much, even as she elides what exactly she’s doing, so it’s hard to trust any of her actual behaviour. Still, I think the chemistry is genuine, and will probably play a part in the two follow-up novellas, which I’m likely to pick up eventually.
The book starts with Ada stuck in her dead ship while trying to do a salvage job and forced to signal for help… which the other ship nearby is perilously slow to answer. Once aboard, she quickly starts flirting and teasing, trying to make herself useful (and in fact, indispensable), inveigling herself into the team’s super-secret mission.
The fact that she’s got ulterior motives is obvious throughout (she tells us), but the slow reveal of what exactly she’s doing (and something of why) is a lot of the page count — that and her flirtation with Rian White, the (also incredibly obvious) undercover government operative. It’s fun picking out her clues, though they’re not that difficult to spot (watch out for the status of her jetpack, for instance). Occasionally she outright lies to the reader and that’s less fun to me, feels like not playing the game — though it’s necessary in the opening in order to avoid understanding one element of what she’s doing right away.
It’s not subtle, but it’s fun, with snippets of worldbuilding about why humanity is out in the stars (the usual depressing reason: we fucked up Earth), what people do out in space, and what various factions want/need out of the situation. As a novella, it’s relatively slim on the worldbuilding, but there’s still enough to support the situation Ada’s in. I’m curious where all this setup is going… and yeah, okay, I’m curious whether Rian and Ada get together, given the givens.
Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)
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