TL;DR Review: A classic spy thriller…in space! Fast-paced, gripping, and intriguing.
Synopsis:
If life were fair, ace pilot Jose Carriles should have ended up a desk jockey like his former friend Corin Timony, back on the lunar colony of New Destiny. Instead, he’s the pilot of the Mosaic—a massive ship taking the Interstellar Union’s first-ever mission to outside our solar system.
Timony should have been the best spy at the Bazaar, the lunar colony’s international intelligence arm. Instead, she’s been demoted to admin duties like monitoring long-range communications. She has no one to blame but herself—and maybe Carriles.
But when the Mosaic experiences a series of strange malfunctions and Carriles is forced to take a wild gamble to save the ship, he begins to suspect the reasons behind the exploratory mission weren’t exactly on the up and up.
At the same time, Timony’s old instincts kick in as she realizes the distress call she received from the Mosaic has been wiped without a trace.
As people start to end up dead and loyalties are tested, Timony and Carriles find themselves entangled in a star-spanning conspiracy that drags them through the darkest corners of their government—and their own personal failures—and face-to-face with a reckoning that could destroy humanity as we know it.
Full Review:
Dark Space is the perfect book for fans of John Le Carre, a slow-burn yet quick-moving thriller that had me blazing through page after page to find out what the heck is going on.
From the beginning, it’s clear that things are NOT all right:
- Aboard the Mosaic, a colonizing ship hurtling through space toward a planet that is to be humanity’s hope of the future, pilot Jose Carriles suspects something is very much wrong when not one, not two, but three separate ship systems fail all at the same time. Worse, no one—not the captain nor the head engineer—seems interested in finding out.
- Back on New Destiny, humanity’s moon colony, Corin Timony receives a cryptic message from the Mosaic, only to have it immediately canceled. To top it off, she’d ordered to go home and forget about what she saw, only for a mysterious senator to push her to look into matters and for the only other person to see the Mosaic’s message to wind up dead.
Though light years and galaxies separate the two stories, it’s clear from the beginning that they are very much linked. Figuring out how is where the fun comes in.
The stakes are set from the very beginning, and the tension just gets ratcheted up with every new obstacle, enemy, discovery, and mystery. The pacing of each chapter is zippy enough to keep you wanting to read on—I said “just one more chapter” about a dozen times—and the hooks are baited so well that you’re drawn deeper and deeper.
I legitimately had knots in my shoulder as the story drew closer to revealing what the heck was going on, and even then, that’s just the beginning of MORE mystery, more suspense, more danger, and more challenges for the characters to overcome.
The action scenes were fun but short—this isn’t a Ludlum or Clancy thriller, but the sort that involves investigation over ass-kicking, problem-solving and people-handling over spaceship chases and gunfights.
But make no mistake: the book gives you all the excitement, intrigue, suspense, and exhilaration you could ask for. Atop that, the character work done into both Timony and Carriles was excellent, exploring their past screw-ups, present quagmires, and bleak futures in enough detail to make them easily relatable and grounded characters.
There’s even a bit of Star Trek-esque commentary on humanity woven nicely into the story. Through this adventure, we come face to face with both our flaws and fortes as a society. But by the ending, we’re shown a brighter way forward and left with a sense of hope that offers wonderful closure.
I enjoyed the hell out of this book—I read it in one day—and absolutely recommend it to anyone who is looking for a classic spy thriller…but set in space!
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