An immersive and entertaining mystery set on a moon of Saturn.
A young space crewman is tasked with solving a murder in Hendrix’s debut SF mystery, the first in a series.
Alejandro Detweiler is not meant for Earth. Like all Islanders—humans born and bred on the moons of Saturn—his purpose in life is to help sustain the planetary system’s extensive transactinide mining industry. Not content to spend his existence working on his family’s vegetable farm on the moon Dione, he joined the Aerospace Guard hoping for adventure. Now, he’s an engineer on the utility ship Custis, the most junior of the 12-man crew, toiling to keep the engines running as the craft cruises between moons. On his first flight, the Custis is diverted to the moon Janus, also known as the Prospector’s World. Dismissed by one of Al’s crewmates as “the System’s fastest route to bankruptcy,” Janus is a colony with 50 permanent occupants hoping to strike it rich. (“The runaways and castaways from every civilized place in the System…They’re at each other’s throats whenever they’re not digging for the next big TA strike, but they’d scream like banshees if you tried to force them off that rock.”) There’s been an accidental death: the local Justice, a government official appointed to oversee the colony. The death is suspicious enough for the Custis to take the body back to the spaceport, but its captain instructs Chief of the Ship Lionel Collins to remain behind and carry out the investigation, and Al to remain with him to serve as his eyes and ears. Not long after the ship leaves, Collins is attacked and incapacitated, leaving Al the lone guardsman left to solve the crime. To do so will require delving into the professional grudges and personal animosities of the local populace, which includes the hot-headed “constable,” a litigious prospector, and an assembly of back-stabbing minor officials. Al will have to be careful, since whoever took out Collins is surely planning to take out his assistant as well.
The author makes the most of his Saturnian setting, periodically reminding the reader of Janus’ crowded sky. “In the east, Epimetheus, Janus’s orbital twin, dominated the sky,” marvels Al. “Seemingly as large as my outstretched fist, it floated above the horizon, the brighter half lit by Saturn’s reflected glow, the dark remainder barely visible under the diminished light from the ring.” Eighteen-year-old Al makes for an unlikely detective; his ambition in joining up with the Aerospace Guards has nothing to do with law enforcement, and his attempts to navigate this strange community of characters—all memorably rendered by Hendrix—make for an intriguing fish-out-of-water tale. There’s great pleasure to be found in the procedural plot, in which the reader’s understanding of the world and the crime unfold at roughly the same pace. The story is largely about small-town claustrophobia, with themes of jealousy and resentment that would not be out of place in a yarn about an Old West boomtown or a quaint English village. The reader will hope further mysteries involving the young guardsman are in the works—after all, Saturn has some 270 other moons left to explore.
An immersive and entertaining mystery set on a moon of Saturn.Pub Date: March 19, 2025
ISBN: 9798992565300
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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