A shamus in space vs. a serial killer wielding alien spiders—not as silly as it sounds.
A reluctant celebrity police detective in the alien-filled galaxy of the far future is drawn into an investigation of deaths aboard a luxury tourist starship in Charsper’s SF novel.
In a 30th-century space-operatic future of variegated aliens (and frequent human-alien intermarriage), Avei Themis is the daughter of a pair of “Arachnologist” scientists, a pan-species couple with an entire institute devoted to studying the galaxy’s rarest spiders for potential wonder-drug cures. Following the murder of her sister by a sadistic serial killer a decade earlier, Avei pursued a career in law enforcement with the Mernin Security Forces, specializing in hunting the worst multiple murderers across all the known worlds. As a result, Avei has become (quite against her wishes) a celebrity sleuth, the subject of a series of unauthorized books and movies (“The vast majority of the content they published was false”). Having lost two of her best friends while trailing a fire-worshipping religious fanatic in a previous adventure, Avei now considers herself a failure and wants to leave the field to go back to work in spider science instead. But it so happens there is another infamous serial slayer, nicknamed Zarul, now at large—and Zarul’s MO is to terrorize and kill using a variety of the deadliest spiders. A victim of arachnid poisoning turns up on the luxury star-liner Delphi, which is operated (not entirely well) by the powerful and possibly compromised Breckin family. Avei (accompanied by her shape-shifting holographic AI partner Sezin) is tasked to investigate. The ship carries a number of shady potential suspects, including the violent wastrel heir to the Breckin business empire, a cash-poor aspiring actress/runaway cult member, and a debt-ridden writer who has built her career on exploiting a thinly disguised Avei in print with a series of potboilers. Even a space mafia syndicate may lurk in the shadows. The Delphimakes an unexpected jump into wormhole-travel space before Avei can disembark and make good on her promise to quit the force, trapping the ensemble on board for 12 hours with at least one sinister slayer amid the cast.
Underneath the rococo menagerie of alien races bearing manifold shapes and scales and numbers of arms, the narrative is a fairly classic whodunit, perhaps with a smaller suspect pool than one might expect under the cosmos-spanning circumstances. The solution to the enigma isn’t exactly a head-spinner, but it satisfies and makes sense on its own broad terms. While the far-out milieu and space-opera trimmings carry baggage that might tilt the novel toward SF camp, the author refrains from pitching the material at a lightweight ray-gun level or going overboard into hardboiled noir cliches. Yes, down these mean spaceways a gal must go, but the story is given a human (well, mostly human) face. Avei carries her own deep scars, psychological and physical, from her life and career choices; there is a hint of romance on the event-horizon, and death-by-spider is not pretty (even though the heroine defines herself as a lover of animals, including the nasty eight-legged creatures). If the Kirk-Spock era starship USSEnterprise had a few spinner-racks of pulp paperbacks in the lounge for recreational crew consumption, this material would fit right in.
A shamus in space vs. a serial killer wielding alien spiders—not as silly as it sounds.Pub Date: April 28, 2025
ISBN: 9798992757910
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Buckle up—fans of page-turning SF may find themselves binge-reading this novel in one butt-numbing marathon session.
Like a truck with no brakes speeding down a steep mountain road, Islington’s latest is an adrenaline-fueled SF thrill ride that follows a biomechanically enhanced assassin as he tries to understand his mysterious origins.
The chaotic opening scene gives readers a clear indication of what they’re in for: Contract killer Azure, attempting to complete a mission, is involved in a life-or-death battle with a multieyed biomachine called an Argos. “The thing’s bipedal but has six gorilla-like arms that end in half-metre-long claws,” he complains. After Azure barely dispatches the monster and kills his target, his AI assistant, Atti, informs him of his next job: protecting an elderly—and incredibly rich—woman living in a sprawling underground bunker in the middle of nowhere. “Old Woman,” as Azure calls her, isn’t forthcoming with personal details; all Azure can suss out is that she may be the target of a powerful organized crime syndicate—the same organization that employs him! Is Azure’s ultimate goal to save her or kill her? Although the worldbuilding could’ve been more comprehensive, Islington’s editing choices are brilliant—he strips away the insignificant narrative content to create a streamlined, action-packed adventure with seemingly one goal: to keep the reader furiously turning pages. The various mysteries—Azure’s murky beginnings, the tragic death of his best friend years earlier, Old Woman’s true identity, etc.—maintain the momentum and intensity. The takeaway here is the narrative potential of the characters as well as the plethora of subjects that could be explored more deeply, like immortality for the rich, cloning, and the potential to create bioengineered nightmares for “security.” Islington leaves the conclusion tantalizingly ambiguous. This novel could be the jumping-off point for a memorable series.
Buckle up—fans of page-turning SF may find themselves binge-reading this novel in one butt-numbing marathon session.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2026
ISBN: 9781668239247
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2026
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