A complex, tightly woven space mystery that will keep readers guessing until the very end.
A snarky heroine must play detective in Little’s space-bound whodunit.
Bellerophona Beauregard didn’t expect to actually get sentenced in court after being accused of inadvertently rendering her community vulnerable to an alien invasion; she definitely didn’t anticipate being consigned to a lifetime of indentured servitude on a passenger ship leaving her home planet of Anaranjado. But mere seconds after the decision is handed down, Bell is knocked out while trying to escape and wakes up on the spacecraft 22 years later from cryosleep to a voice telling her it’s time to get to work. The ship’s glitchy consciousness, which Bell names “Loopy” (“I am currently suffering from numerous quirks”), explains that crew members are awakened at odd intervals to perform tasks and repairs in order to keep everything in tip-top shape for the passengers. Bell doesn’t even get a chance to meet all of the other eight conscious crew members before the ship informs them that there has been a murder on board. The ship, having malfunctioned (again), can’t tell them who did it, and everyone suspects everyone else. But later, Loopy sends a private message informing her that he knows her to be innocent and is putting her in charge of the investigation to solve the case. Of course, she can’t tell anyone, because then she would be a target herself. With a cast of quirky characters ranging from a fully robotic monk to an alien creature made up of sentient worms working in concert, Little has crafted one crazy mystery. Two elements make this novel stand out in a crowded field of space thrillers: the truly fascinating, if not outright weird, aliens, enhancements, and strange beings that inhabit the world depicted in these pages; and the disorienting twists and turns the author throws in to keep Bell and the readers off the trail of the killer. The story may feel like it’s getting a little too deep in the weeds with of all the complex maneuvering the author has done, but mystery buffs and SF fans alike will find a lot to enjoy here.
A complex, tightly woven space mystery that will keep readers guessing until the very end.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781951445744
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Cursed Dragon Ship Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
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
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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