3rd Annual SFR Galaxy Awards: Round One by Charlee Allden

Best New SFR Series featuring the Alien Warrior Meets Human Woman Trope
The Alliance series by S.E. Smith - Hunter’s Claim and Razor’s Traitorous Heart

In Hunter’s Claim and Razor’s Traitorous Heart S.E. Smith takes the decades old alien warrior meets human woman trope and updates it for a modern audience. She’s kept the broad scope, space travel, and warrior heroes of the futuristic genre and added a post-apocalyptic feel to the earth-based portion of the novels. More importantly she has drawn smart, strong, multi-faceted heroines that will appeal to the modern romance reader. The women in these books are allowed to really challenge the warrior heroes and the tough, powerful warriors respect their heroines’ ingenuity and bravery. I love the depth and dimension given to both the fictional world and the characters. 

Best Reformed Villain Romance
Voodoo ‘n’ Vice by KC Burn

I’m always in awe of authors who can redeem a villain from an earlier book in the series and turn them into the hero of the next. In Voodoo ‘N’ Vice, KC Burn achieves just such a transformation. The author convinces us to take another look at former villain Gideon by helping us understand where his cold demeanor and his ugly beliefs have come from. Once that is done we watch as things start to make him question those beliefs and his own motivations for sticking with them in the face of good sense. As he changes and begins to fall in love with sexy tattooed fire dancer, Tai, the reader has seen Gideon’s true personality emerge. In Voodoo ‘n’ Vice gives the readers woon worthy heroes that are well developed and unique, world building that is rich and consistent, and romance done right. Highly recommended!

Best Two-Heroes-Are-Better-Than-One Romance
Flesh by Kylie Scott

You might think it would be great to have a person that would love you the way you’ve always wanted to be loved. A person who would know what you needed even before you did. Someone to make you laugh and make you sigh with pleasure. But what about someone who would protect you with the skills of a kick-ass cop, never flinch at doing whatever it took to keep you alive, gladly lay down his life for you?  Why chose if you could have both? 

In Flesh, Kylie Scott does a great job selling the idea that the heroine really can have her cake and eat it too. The post-apocalyptic setting helps—desperate times and all. But the well-crafted characters really make the readers believe such a relationship would make sense and work for three people who would never have considered a multi-partner relationship before the Zombie outbreak. Flesh is a fun, sexy read with plenty of excitement, danger, and end of the world challenges. It’s well written and more traditionally romantic that you might expect from a threesome story. It also has a great Australian flare and setting. I could almost hear the kookaburras laughing in the trees.