Review: Bernice Summerfield: Filthy Lucre by James Parsons and Alexander Stirling-Brown

Hardcover, 231 pages
Published 2013

Acquired July 2018
Read December 2018

Bernice Summerfield: Filthy Lucre
by James Parsons and Alexander Stirling-Brown

The novels haven't exactly been a highlight of Bernice Summerfield's "Legion era," though this one isn't terrible. It's not as good as The Slender-Fingered Cats of Bubastis, though I did find more to interest me here than in The Weather on Versimmon. This is a mostly standalone adventure for Benny, Ruth, and Jack (with small parts for Peter and Irving), set during the New Frontiers box set (between episodes 1 and 2, specifically). In parallel plotlines, the trio meet a chip tycoon who's very interested in archaeology and rescue a disabled cargo ship.

The book is well written and interesting enough. The writers have a good grasp on the main characters' voices, and know how to write an interesting action sequence. Moving between the two parallel plotlines maintains the reader's interest; it actually takes a long time to figure out how the two plots actually fit together. Once you figure it out, though, it's a bit underwhelming, and one suspects the novel was structured this way because doing it chronologically would reveal how little it actually has going on. If the crashed ship story was inserted where it goes chronologically, it would be a long, irrelevant diversion from the book's main plot. The main plot isn't much: a wealthy person is sponsoring archaeology, but he turns out to have a hidden agenda. A man is sexually interested in Bernice, but he's just taking advantage of her. These are surely clichés of Benny's solo adventures at this point. It would be more of a twist if it turned out everything was aboveboard. And the bit where he comes back at the end to torture her once the main story is over feels like padding when the authors realized they were thirty pages short; it goes nowhere and does nothing.

For those keeping score, this book features the third popular resort planet within easy flight of Legion, the supposed most distant planet in the galaxy (after ones in Road Trip and The Slender-Fingered Cats). More than that, Benny is popping back and forth between Legion and worlds of significance all the time in this book, rather undermining the setting of the Legion era.