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Kiss of the Blue Dragon is Julie Beard’s 2003 futuristic romance, set in 2104 Chicago, an Asian-fusion cyberpunk-light urban setting that Beard mostly used as a frame for the romance plot but which carries more conceptual weight than the format usually permits. Angel Baker is a half-Chinese ex-parking-meter cop turned licensed bounty hunter who is hired by an aging billionaire to recover his kidnapped granddaughter from the Blue Dragon syndicate. The bounty leads to Lin Yu, a syndicate enforcer with a backstory that complicates everything.
Beard is a working romance writer, not an SF writer, and the genre split is what makes Kiss of the Blue Dragon interesting. The romance plot is paced exactly to the futuristic-romance template Sherrilyn Kenyon was building at the same time. The SF worldbuilding (post-Loyola-disturbance Chicago, the surveillance-state regulation of bounty work, the Cantonese-coded Blue Dragon hierarchy) is more thought-through than expected. The mystery is the weakest leg, with the kidnapping resolution telegraphed well before its third-act payoff.
Recommended for fans of cyberpunk romance (Linnea Sinclair’s Gabriel’s Ghost, Susan Grant’s Talyn) and for readers looking for books like Kiss of the Blue Dragon at the intersection of urban-fantasy romance and bounty-hunter mystery. Three stars, with the worldbuilding earning the extra half.
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