CHAOS by Constance Fay – Review

I received this book for free from the Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Chaos by Constance Fay
Series: Uncharted Hearts #3
Published by Bramble on March 11 2025
Genres: Adult, Romance, Science fiction
Pages: 352
Format: ARC
Source: Publisher
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The nitty-gritty: Humor, action and romance combine in this latest entry in Constance Fay’s absurdly fun sci-fi series.

This is the third book in Constance Fay’s Uncharted Hearts series, and Chaos is another adrenaline-fueled story with lovable characters and plenty of humor. I did have a few issues with pacing and logistics this time, although Fay’s brand of humor is on point. Although you could read this as a standalone, I suggest reading the series in order, otherwise you’ll miss lots of character and plot development.

After the events in the last book, the crew of the Calamity is taking a well deserved break. It’s during this time that ship’s engineer Caro Ogunyemi gets a call from her old friend Ven, asking her if she’d be interested in helping him with a retrieval job. Unfortunately, the job involves infiltrating a luxury prison called Shikigami and extracting two soldiers who were sent there to rescue a prisoner. Victor and Victory, the brother/sister team who were tasked with the rescue mission, have gone radio silent, and Ven is worried about them.

Caro isn’t too keen on going to Shikigami because it’s run by Carmichael Pierce, head of the diabolical Pierce family. She did some work for them years ago but things turned sour, and now the Pierces are trying to find her. What better way to break into the prison that turn herself over to them? But once inside, Caro discovers what the prison is really doing. An intriguing prisoner named Leviathan has been augmented with a control chip that turns him into a mindless super soldier, part of Pierce’s Project Titan initiative. Caro is drawn to him, but Levi just wants to kill her. Now it’s up to Caro to rescue him, figure out how to disable his chip, and get them both to safety—along with Victor and Victory—before Carmichael Pierce can stop them.

“Chaos” is the perfect title for this book, because it’s literally chaos from start to finish. Not only that, but Caro herself is a bit on the chaotic side and sort of a mess, which is one reason I loved her so much. Most of the story is told from Caro’s first person point of view, although we do get a few chapters from Victory’s perspective too. These confused me at first, but I came to really enjoy her chapters. Caro is brash, messy, outspoken and doesn’t always think before she speaks. She’s also a brilliant engineer and hacker and can fix any kind of tech. She thinks on her feet, and in this story she has to because trying to escape a prison isn’t all that easy, turns out.

Something happens to Caro in the first pages of the story that is important when she gets to Shikigami, and I thought it was a very cool idea. It adds some complications to the plot and also helps with the brewing romance between the two main characters. And speaking of, I thought the romance was pretty well done, although there’s nothing slow burn about their attraction! The romance is fairly tame in this series, so readers looking for extra spicy scenes might be disappointed—but don’t worry, there are plenty of other elements in the story to love. We do get a hint of which couple might be the focus in the next book, and I hope I’m right because the story between these two was a lot of fun.

Fay’s dialog is still as funny as ever, and the humor in this series is one of the best things about it. The danger and action are off the charts, and there’s rarely any downtime for anyone in the story. Her characters are lots of fun too. I loved getting to know Caro more, and Victor and Victory are great additions to the cast. One of my favorite new characters in this book is an android named GR81 (who Caro calls “great one” lol), and he and Caro bond since GR81 has become sentient and now wants to make friends. There are some harrowing scenes involving these two that brought quite a bit of emotion to the story.

There were a few things that didn’t quite work for me. For some reason, I found the scenes inside the prison to be confusing at times. Maybe I just couldn’t grasp the layout of the prison, but trying to imagine where the characters were at any point had me scratching my head. It seemed like the characters were going around in circles and not really making much progress, especially since Caro and Levi finally escape, only to decide they both need to go back inside the prison for different reasons.

But aside from this, I had so much fun with Chaos. One of the big mysteries in the story revolves around Levi and who he really is (since they put the chip in his head he’s forgotten a lot about his previous life), and I like the way the answers are slowly revealed. I haven’t seen an announcement yet about the next book, but I’m hoping it’s on the horizon! I can tell Constance Fay still has lots of stories to tell about the crew of the Calamity.

Big thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy.