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
A cleverly titled, cozy SF romance that marks Thorne as a writer to watch.
After purchasing a dilapidated, century-old starship called the Destitute, Torian Razner discovers that the moss covering it is, in fact, a deeply sarcastic sentient computer with abandonment issues.
Torian’s sister, Celise, is dying. Determined to save her life by getting her to a distant planet with air she can breathe, Torian ignores her former captain Amelia Perrosk’s warning that it’s an impossible task (along with any romantic feelings she might have for Amelia). Using the only ionite bars she has to her name, Torian purchases an ancient, moss-covered alien starship that appears to be on its last legs, so to speak. She hardly expected the moss to be a sentient computer or for it to hold a century-old grudge against its former alien captain. Moss quickly proves itself to be acerbic, intelligent, and rightly angry after being having been left behind for 100 years by its former captain. The two form a reluctant and surprising alliance, Torian proving to Moss that not all captains are “dog-turd fungus,” and they both gradually evolve into the best versions of themselves, human or otherwise. It’s obvious from the early pages that Thorne has crafted a story tailored to fans of Becky Chambers’ Monk & Robot series and Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries. Falling somewhere between the two, this is a delightful mashup of romance, found family, and a touch of violence as Moss grapples with its feelings about its former captain and the unexpected kindness that Torian shows. Sweet without being overly saccharine, it’s a book for readers who want the adventure that comes with the vastness of outer space without its harsher realities.
A cleverly titled, cozy SF romance that marks Thorne as a writer to watch.Pub Date: July 7, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414144
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bramble Books
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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