A clever, intricate, and low-key SF thriller about a space treasure hunt gone bad.
In this SF mystery, a valuable mining company ship, missing in Saturn’s rings for more than a decade, attracts the attention of an amateur sleuth when one of the craft’s escape pods is recovered with a freshly slain corpse inside.
In Hendrix’s second installment of a series, Alejandro “Al” Detweiler is the proverbial farm boy (the family farm is on the moon) who left for the more adventuresome opportunities in Saturn’s wide-open environment. A culture has risen there via enterprising (and corruptible) humans, mining the precious substance “transactinide.” Though an “Aerospace Guard” on search-and-rescue assignments, Al tends to be present when criminal mischief occurs and he has something of a reputation as a detective. Such is the case with a clue involving a 12-year-old mystery, the enigma of the Deveraux. This was an elite corporate vessel, supposedly carrying a fortune in contraband, that suffered inexplicable guidance malfunction and plunged into the chaos of Saturn’s primary ring and disappeared. Now, a fresh space shipwreck, the Anderson, is found with half of the crew missing—and an escape pod from the Deveraux floating in space nearby. Inside the pod is an Anderson crewman—stabbed to death. Was the Anderson on an unauthorized treasure hunt for the Deveraux and its legendary bonanza? Appointed to assist the investigation, Al probes decade-old secrets, imposters, smugglers, and scoundrels. The hero narrates in a fairly dispassionate style—neo-gumshoe hardboiled stuff is only in trace-element doses (“The System Police had done more than remove everything not bolted down. Forensic technicians had examined this room since I was last here, going through with scraper, lens, and brush”). The setting is one where “gravity reigned throughout the Saturn System, holding all to its will. In some places its touch was light, in others its grip as harsh as frozen stone.” Yet the prose eschews heavy astrophysics jargon. Readers comfortable with crime fiction who have a military/naval/JAG background might feel at home here, more so than typical SF fans. What could dampen their jets, though, is an ambiguous ending (more of a howdunit than a whodunit overall), with loose ends, some nefarious characters offstage, and dark repercussions for Al down the line. Future installments of this smart, engaging, genre-crossing series are planned.
A clever, intricate, and low-key SF thriller about a space treasure hunt gone bad.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9798992565317
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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