Ten years ago, the criminal gang known as the Cannibal Club split up after a job-gone-wrong. Now Cayce, son of their former leader, Strange, wants to get the band back together to break his dad out of a top security facility in the Kuiper Belt. After ten years, for various reasons, some of them aren't quite up to the job any more, but Cayce is persiasive. To finance the rescue they undertake a series of jobs, each more perilous than the last. Each character takes it in tourn to take the viewpoint, and finally they get to the Kuiper Belt facility to discover that it's not quite as simple as Cayce made out. This was action packed, quirky and fun, and I enjoyed the different viewpoints, though in the end it left me not knowing which character to focus on. There was, however, a good twist at the end.

loved it a lot but felt like smth was missing tbh, the characters were good
thank you netgalley for the arc

Thanks to NetGalley and publishers for the e ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I had such a blast reading this - it's brain candy. The characters are all fun, each chapter from a different character perspective running through the main heist alongside flashbacks to the Heist Where It All Went Wrong. It's action packed, I never skipped a paragraph, all the settings were fun. It actually reminded me a bit of a star wars dnd campaign I was running earlier this year. It has the beefy fighter, the smooth operator, the man with the plan, the hacker, and the pilot, featuring all your favourite tropes and settings: skeezy casino, slimy white collar tax evasion, shopping montage, an outer space overpriced mechanic shop, technobabble, and of course a prison break.

A combination of a heist caper and space opera? Sign me up!

And this does not disappoint--in fact it is far more absorbing and exciting than I assumed at the beginning, which pretty much follows the structure of Oceans 11 as the crew, scattered everywhere, with dire references to a job gone bad, come together again. The first person POV for each character is rarely done, but it works here once I got used to it.

Stand by for a plot twist that jets you into hyperspace. The deliciously complex characters wrestle with tough questions without sacrificing pacing, making this an absorbing read--with plenty of room for follow-ups.

Note: I received a free unpublished proof of this book, for a limited time, in exchange for an honest review. All opinions here are my own.

Another book I didn’t quite finish, but having gotten around…25% of the way through? I can already tell it’s promising and I want to read more from this author.

(When you read a lot of science fiction and fantasy like I do, you can generally tell if you like something or not from the beginning. While I obviously don’t know how it ends, and could possibly hate the ending, I do think the writing is good enough for this book to at least be worth your consideration.)

The Kuiper Belt Job is a classic heist book with flawed-and-edgy but nonetheless sympathetic main characters. Oh, and it’s in space. The characters all come across as unique and interesting, and while they fall into some typical sci-fi heist tropes, it doesn’t feel like Levine is totally ripping off some existing intellectual property. I can’t really say much about the plot, because it’s pretty typical for heist stories, but nonetheless entertaining. As much as I love groundbreaking creativity, I don’t believe in putting sheer originality on a pedestal—I’d rather read a work that competently trods well-worn paths, than a work that tries a lot of new stuff only to leave the reader puzzled and scratching their head.

I’m not sure if I’ll buy this when it comes out, as I can (alas) only buy so many books at a time, but given that I like to buy hard copies of unique works by lesser-known authors I might actually get one. I also think it would make a great gift for anyone in your life who likes action-packed space opera books!

I’m a huge fan of heist stories, so when I saw The Kuiper Belt Job billed as Ocean’s 11 meets the Expanse I was all in. 10 years ago a job went horribly wrong for the members of the Cannibal Club, now the it’s time to get the band back together and try to makes things right. Jumping back and forth from the botched job 10 years earlier to present day, we see both stories unfold: how things went wrong and how pulling off their latest jobs and getting back together. Chapters switch POVs and it was a little odd to have them all told in first person. I honestly can’t think of too many books that have used the 1st person POV for more than two alternating characters, but it actually works. The characters are for the most part nicely complex as is the story and IMO there aren’t heist stories in general never mind ones taking place in space. This was the first book I’ve read by David Levine, but I enjoyed this one enough that I’ll be checking out more of it in the future. 4.5 stars, rounding up to 5. Thanks so much to author, publisher and NetGalley for allowing me access to an eARC.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/book/1143138805?ean=9781647100919&bvnotificationId=6dc40b98-7d89-11ee-a49f-0a2e0469907b&bvmessageType=REVIEW_APPROVED&bvrecipientDomain=gmail.com#review/262768451

I picked this up for review from Netgalley, even though I didn't love one of the author's previous books (Arabella The Traitor of Mars), because, despite some issues, that book was well written, and I wanted to give the author another chance. Also, I enjoy heists.

I'm glad I did give him that second chance, because this was highly enjoyable, well edited, well written, intricately plotted as a heist should be, and corrected three and a half out of the four issues I had with the previous book.

I never warmed to Arabella as a character, never believed in the worldbuilding, was concerned by the white-saviour aspect, and dinged it several points for a deus ex machina moment when completely unexpected allies turn up, by total random chance, exactly at the psychological moment. This book has the last of those issues (though the chance is less random; there is a little bit of foreshadowing, just not enough for me to count it as a Cavalry Rescue rather than a deus ex machina), but the other issues don't recur. The only worldbuilding glitch I spotted was that a fusion plant melts down and produces radiation as if it was a fission plant (I also felt the Maguffin was not particularly plausible, but gave it a trope pass), and I found the varied characters immediately distinguishable and memorable, with depth to their backstories and motivations that helped me to empathize with them.

The narrative swaps around between the members of a heist crew, each of whom gets a first-person point of view - and in the flashbacks that gradually reveal how one of their previous heists went terribly wrong and scattered the surviving crew across the solar system, damaged and grieving, the point of view is "we," because that's how tight they were. They're now all more or less desperate; their various hustles are coming apart, one of them is ill, and when the son of their old leader turns up to recruit them for a rescue mission for his father, they all have a mix of reluctance and eagerness to return to being a crew again, and the eagerness wins out. Along the way, they have to pull a series of varied jobs, one for each member of the old crew, mostly to get resources they will need on the rescue job, and this serves the important purpose of showing them working together and using their skills, so that when we hit the rescue it's all established for us. Nor does everything go smoothly on those jobs, and we see their full resourcefulness, courage, mutual trust and ability to improvise, as well as their solid skills.

There's a shocking twist partway through, so powerful I won't even put it in spoiler tags, that takes the heist genre convention of turning everything the audience thought on its head and turns it up to 11.

At first I was going to put it in the Silver tier of my Best of the Year list, meaning a solid piece of work without significant flaws, but on reflection it's good enough to make it to the Gold tier; the characters are rich and multidimensional, they wrestle with moral and existential questions without bogging down the pace, the plot is complex and twisty and doesn't trip over itself, and if the space-opera setting is conventional and has a couple of small flaws, well, it's just a stage for the characters to act on.

Recommended.