Tim Seeley

Sarah Beattie

The XXX-plorers embark on their second mission to a naughty world (that may have inspired the biblical Hell...or at the very least ripped it off). But whips, chains and spanks have nothing on the torture of STD testing! Meanwhile, a powerful romance rocks

Money Shot Vol. 2 TPB

Lauren Sullivan

The first volume of Money Shot was absolutely ridiculous silliness, full of raunchy jokes and a gleeful commitment to not taking itself seriously. Unfortunately, that’s not true of this second volume and it impacted my enjoyment of the series.

For whatever reason, this volume seems to be going for a more serious tone and it didn’t work for me. At the beginning, team is arriving back from a not-so-successful mission. While Chris researches where to go next (and deals with an alien STD), the rest of the team takes a break, which includes Bree and Omar meeting over drinks to talk about Chris and all her issues. It’s not exactly the most compelling plot, though it’s interspersed with a completely unrelated star-crossed alien lovers story which, while not particularly original, was still my favorite part of the whole volume.

Besides the tone change, the plot is all over the place. There’s the previously mentioned love triangle, bits about how Earth was rejected from joining a galactic alliance due to the actions of the US president, and then, finally, the team arrives on a new planet that will hopefully alleviate their power problems for the near future. Unfortunately, there’s not much time spent with those new aliens before another subplot comes and takes over the story. The political satire, in particular, landed really flat with me. It felt shoved in and didn’t really seem to add much to the plot. Look, I understand the urge to take potshots at Trump, but it just wasn’t funny. One of the things I liked before was the genuine curiosity the scientists brought to the sex scenes. That’s obviously not the case with the Trump-analogue. And for something about scientifically pushing boundaries, it’s really quite tame sex-wise. I was also disappointed by how the Chris/Bree/Omar relationship was wrapped up.

It’s not like it’s all a slog, though. There’s quite a few one-liners and gags that land right, and while there’s less Little Shot there’s more of Chris’s talking cat. The art is still unbelievably gorgeous. That and the star-crossed alien lovers (ok, and maybe that ridiculous chainsaw) are what saved the volume for me.

Overall, I didn’t enjoy this volume as much as the first, and I doubt I’ll continue with the series, if there even is a third volume.

I received an advance review copy of this book from Edelweiss. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Money Shot Vol. 2 TPB

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