Exploring Grief and Revenge in ‘The Lady Widow: Death Among the Stars’: Book Review

I saw it in a TikTok video. C.M. Lockhart, a speculative fiction writer, was talking about her upcoming release about a woman who travels through space to get revenge for the murder of the love of her life. Naturally, I was interested. It took a while to unpack my feelings about this book, but overall, it did a great job creating depth in its characters and investment in the series.

In the science fiction novella, The Lady Widow: Death Among the Stars by C.M. Lockhart, we begin with a grieving widow named Kyra. Her husband was recently murdered, resulting in her inheriting his ship and crew. He’d always wanted her to experience the galaxies with her, and this was his final request. After an extensive grieving period, Kyra trains and sets her sights on revenge with plans to take down the entire operation that took her husband from her. 

Now, about the unpacking of feelings. At first, I thought the story was just fine. The time spent grieving is precisely half of the story. For someone like me who loves these types of books, I was not a happy camper sitting through all that grief and inaction with Kyra. Not because I think grief shouldn’t be experienced but because the grief shifts almost completely into training, revenge, and rage, leaving me with whiplash. If the story had started midway through Kyra’s mourning and then focused more on the training and the revenge with intermittent flashbacks and feelings of grief and mourning, I think I would have reacted better to how the grief was conveyed.

However, I did love the crew and how they fit into Xavier’s and Kyra’s world. These side characters have depth to them that kept me invested not only in Kyra’s interactions with them but also with each other. I’m VERY interested in Pia’s relationship with Xavier and how she makes it through her grieving period. I also want to see more of her relationship with Kyra and her loathing of Sigurd. Based on the flashbacks, we also learn that the crew is filled with bloodlust and capable of seeing through this revenge-riddled adventure they’re about to go on. I love that the crew gave her space to grieve at her own pace while they sat patiently, ready to unleash hell on all who did them wrong. Knowing all of this and that this is the first book in this series gives me hope that the story will continue to improve.

Overall, this story is short, sweet, and angry. I’m looking forward to seeing what Kyra and the crew achieve.

You can buy the book from the author here, Bookshop.org, or Amazon.