The message is odd and doesn’t make sense, and Hester immediately senses that David might be trying to tell her something. David is part of a small crew on the asteroid Nimue, a robotics genius whose job as sysadmin lets him work with Nimue’s Overseer, the AI that manages the station’s operations. Hester is only one year into her servitude when she receives a private video message from her old friend David Prussenko, who also survived the Symposium disaster. Parthenope agreed to pay all her medical bills, but in exchange Hester must work for them as a security officer for five years in order to pay off her debts. Hester herself barely escaped with her life and required extensive surgeries in order to survive, which included a prosthetic leg, arm, ear and eye. But their ship, the Symposium, was hijacked and destroyed enroute to the planet, and nearly everyone aboard was killed in the explosion, including Vanguard, the remarkable AI that Hester helped build. Hester Marley is an AI expert who was part of an exploration crew headed toward the planet Titan. The story centers around an asteroid belt controlled by a mining company called Parthenope Enterprises. This book has it all: complex characters and relationships, some timely social commentary, plenty of exciting action and a bunch of twists and misdirection that kept me guessing for a large chunk of the story. I knew it would be hard to top one of my favorite “locked room” sci-fi thrillers-Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes is one I still think about four years later-but Dead Space comes damn close. Hold onto your hats because Kali Wallace’s latest has all the sci-fi mystery goodness of Six Wakes combined with the terrifying, pulse-pounding horror of Alien.
It’s hard to believe, but Dead Space is my first five-star read of 2021, and folks, it’s a good one.
The nitty-gritty: A thrilling, sci-fi horror mystery with plenty of twists, Dead Space is a superb novel and is destined to be one of my favorite books of 2021. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. I received this book for free from the Publisher in exchange for an honest review.
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