Book Review: Dark Space

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.

Dark Space by Rob Hart and Alex Segura will be published on October 8, 2024. Blackstone Publishing provided an early galley for review.

Every now and again, I like to dive into a sci-fi novel about space as it was a genre I read a lot of in my teens. Having enjoyed an earlier novel by Segura, this one caught my eye.

Interestingly enough, this novel has two writers which I always find to be an intriguing exercise. Can I tell the difference between their two styles? (I could not.) Do their styles mesh well together? (They do.) The story itself is split between two main protagonists in two different locations which probably made their work a bit easier (assuming they each took one narrative path, which I am not sure if they did or not).

However, the narrative ping-pong really did not work for me here. While each storyline moved along and eventually came together to a satisfying conclusion, I found myself frustrated by being invested in one only to be jerked back to the other. That took some of the luster off of the book for me.