Winter's Orbit

Winter's Orbit, Everina Maxwell. This is an arranged-marriage romance novel that happens to be set In Space; I like a good SF romance and thought it was a fun read. The Space Plot had a nice mix of mystery-solving and action bits, and I liked the vaguely Vingean worldbuilding, with a small space empire hoping to maintain galactic-bureaucracy protection against much larger and scarier space powers, while the bureaucrats mostly care about recovering bits of higher-order tech (and, for reasons, the protagonists' marriage). (But galactic setting aside this is much more Bujold than Vinge.) There was an earlier version on AO3 (still original fic, not fanfic) that I had apparently downloaded awhile ago and never read; I still haven't read it but I skimmed it in spots, and it didn't have any of the galactic worldbuilding, and simplified the Space Plot somewhat, or at least rearranged it. I thought they were good changes; thumbs up to Maxwell and Maxwell's editor at Tor. By romance-series practices, at least one of the leads in the next book should have been introduced in this one, and by recent trends, an m/m first book might mean we get f/f in the second book, so, fingers crossed for a sequel about Bel, who clearly deserves a book and a wife of her own.