I’ve been meaning to read Fonda Lee for some time, since I keep hearing good things about her epic fantasy trilogy, The Green Bone Saga, that begins with Jade City. Lee has won a World Fantasy Award and Locus Award, and has been nominated for a Hugo and Nebula. The Last Contract of Isako easily meets these high standards.

Isthmus Isako is a highly trained atier contractor—a combination advisor, personal bodyguard, spy, and assassin—who has been working for the director of Astrocom for years. She is considered one of the best tracs in the business, and the best longknifeswoman on the planet Aquilo. She is also over fifty, and has devoted everything to her job. But Astrocom is being dissolved after losing a policy war.

One of Isako’s final jobs is to terminate redundant employees. Aquilo is an extremely hostile planet, colonized and then abandoned by Earth. It is only five hundred years into a terraforming process expected to take many more centuries. Everyone knows that there is nothing extra to support unemployed people. Those who do not voluntarily resign—and take a final walk unprotected out of the domes onto the planet’s lethal surface—have to be literally terminated. And since Isako’s contract will end with Astrocom and its director, she expects to follow those employees into death.

But even on a harsh planet, there are unfathomably rich directors who do not have to make the same sacrifices as ordinary people. The moral Code that Isako lives by demands that atiers carry out the orders given by their directors regardless of the cost to themselves. Isako owes her contracted director her life and loyalty and obedience. She is about to have to seriously question the moral underpinnings on which she judges honor and the value of her life.

The Last Contract of Isako is a gripping science fiction adventure on an alien, complex world. Isako is not only a rare believable female action hero, but a rare well-written aging character. There is action and betrayal and heart. But the unexpected treat is watching Isako wrestle with questions of duty and responsibility, and whether it is possible to find honor in working honorably within a corrupt system.