Book Review: Detour by Jeff Rake & Rob Hart

Posted in Book Reviews by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Title: Detour
Series: Detour, #1
Authors: Jeff Rake & Rob Hart
Publisher: Random House Worlds
Publication date: February 4, 2025
Length: 320 pages
Genre: Science fiction
Source: Review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley
Rating:

A space shuttle flight crew discovers that the Earth they’ve returned to is not the home they left behind in the first book of this emotional, mind-bending thriller series from the creator of the hit Netflix show Manifest and the bestselling author of The Warehouse.

“If The Martian and The Twilight Zone had a baby, it would be Detour—a thriller that messes with your head as you scramble to piece together what’s really going on.”—Steve Netter, Best Thriller Books

Ryan Crane wasn’t looking for trouble—just a cup of coffee. But when this cop spots a gunman emerging from an unmarked van, he leaps into action and unknowingly saves John Ward, a billionaire with presidential aspirations, from an assassination attempt.

As thanks for Ryan’s quick thinking, Ward offers him the chance of a lifetime: to join a group of lucky civilians chosen to accompany three veteran astronauts on the first manned mission to Saturn’s moon Titan.

A devoted family man, Ryan is reluctant to leave on this two-year expedition, yet with the encouragement of his loving wife—and an exorbitant paycheck guaranteeing lifetime care for their disabled son—he crews up and ventures into a new frontier.

But as the ship is circling Titan, it is rocked by an unexplained series of explosions. The crew works together to get back on course, and they return to Earth as heroes.

When the fanfare dies down, Ryan and his fellow astronauts notice that things are different. Some changes are good, such as lavish upgrades to their homes, but others are more disconcerting. Before the group can connect, mysterious figures start tailing them, and their communications are scrambled.

Separated and suspicious, the crew must uncover the truth and decide how far they’re willing to go to return to their normal lives. Just when their space adventure seemingly ends, it shockingly begins.

Detour is an absolutely addictive science fiction thriller — and it’s totally on me that I didn’t realize until about 10 pages from the end that this book isn’t a stand-alone. More on that later… meanwhile, here’s what it’s all about.

Planet Earth is in dire trouble as Detour opens, with the collapse of a huge Antarctic glacier spelling a major escalation of the world’s climate catastrophe. Life on Earth may be unsustainable; science is now looking beyond the planet for a new home for humankind.

Enter billionaire and presidential candidate John Ward, a man with the deepest of pockets, limitless ambition, and a huge ego. He’s funding a project to send a space crew to circle Saturn’s moon Titan, to leave behind satellites to report back on Titan’s ecosystem and help plan for future human settlement there. Thanks to advances in power sources and radiation shielding, a new spaceship has been built that can make the journey to Titan in a year, which means the ship’s crew will have to commit to a two-year journey away from home and loved ones.

In addition to three experienced astronauts, three civilians have been chose to join the expedition: Padma, a scientist who has done pioneering work on the viability of Titan for human habitation; Ryan, a DC cop who just happened to be in the right time and place to save John Ward from an assassination attempt; and Stitch, a graffiti artist who won a lottery for a seat on the mission. With only the briefest of training periods, this motley assembly is soon on their way off-world, each leaving behind complicated work and family situations.

As the synopsis indicates, something goes wrong during the mission, but the crew is able to avert disaster and return home as scheduled. But for the astronauts, there’s something wrong about “home”. Nothing is quite as they left it. Their family lives are different in key ways. The world is mainly the same… but it’s not. And their treatment is decidedly suspicious — rather than getting a heroes’ welcome, they’re warned to avoid the press, stay quiet, and no matter what, not to contact any of the other members of the crew.

The final quarter of the book is a mad rush of action and investigation, as the six astronauts struggle to understand the lives to which they’ve returned, while also trying to piece together exactly what happened out there near Titan, and why powerful forces seem to be gathering to stop them.

And then the book stops! Which I did not expect. When I first requested this book on NetGalley, I didn’t see a mention of this being the first in a series — and I did not go back to re-read the synopsis, either there or on Goodreads, before starting the book. If I had, I might not have been so surprised, somewhere around the 90% mark, to realize that there was absolutely no way this story would be wrapped up by the last page. My bad. Let this be a lesson to me — always read the synopsis (again) before starting a new book!

In any case… Detour is thrilling page-turner, and I’m so glad I read it. I’m a sucker for a great space travel story, and this book delivers. The authors skillfully establish the stakes of the mission right from the start, as well as establishing the core main characters and their individual struggles and backstories. As they depart on their mission, we know them — their strengths, their doubts, what they leave behind, and what they hope for upon their return.

The story is told through vignettes that shift the action between all major players, as well as involving John Ward, some side characters, and a few shadier people as well. The mystery of what happened on the journey and why the world seems changed when the astronauts return isn’t resolved (must leave content for the next book!), but there are enough hints and partial theories that leave a reader with a sense of tantalizing information still to come.

I appreciate that the personal isn’t sacrificed in favor of the action. The action is terrific, but a large part of my enjoyment stems from feeling invested in the characters themselves and caring about each of their lives and their futures.

The authors’ credentials alone let us know that we’re in for a great ride in Detour. Jeff Rakes is the creator of the TV series Manifest, which was one of my pandemic-era binges. Detour has elements that remind me of some elements of Manifest — not in a repetitive way, but more in the sense of themes and the underlying mysteries. Co-author Rob Hart is the author of a bunch of very popular books — of which I’ve only read The Warehouse, but I do have several other of his books on my TBR, and now I’m even more motivated to read them. (There’s a very fun little moment in Detour when both Manifest and Assassins Anonymous get shout-outs — yay to the authors for including this!)

Detour was just the sort of compelling, drop-everything-and-read book that I needed this week! I enjoyed every moment, and will absolutely be back for book #2. Here’s hoping the wait for the next book will take less time than, say… a mission to Titan!

Purchase links: Amazon – Audible audiobook – Bookshop.org – Libro.fm
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17Jun2021

Book Review: Rabbits by Terry Miles

Posted in Book Reviews by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Title: Rabbits
Author: Terry Miles
Publisher: Del Rey
Publication date: June 8, 2021
Length: 448 pages
Genre: Science fiction
Source: Review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley
Rating:

Conspiracies abound in this surreal and yet all-too-real technothriller in which a deadly underground alternate reality game might just be altering reality itself, set in the same world as the popular Rabbits podcast.
It’s an average work day. You’ve been wrapped up in a task, and you check the clock when you come up for air–4:44 pm. You go to check your email, and 44 unread messages have built up. With a shock, you realize it is April 4th–4/4. And when you get in your car to drive home, your odometer reads 44,444. Coincidence? Or have you just seen the edge of a rabbit hole?
Rabbits is a mysterious alternate reality game so vast it uses our global reality as its canvas. Since the game first started in 1959, ten iterations have appeared and nine winners have been declared. Their identities are unknown. So is their reward, which is whispered to be NSA or CIA recruitment, vast wealth, immortality, or perhaps even the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe itself. But the deeper you get, the more deadly the game becomes. Players have died in the past–and the body count is rising.
And now the eleventh round is about to begin. Enter K–a Rabbits obsessive who has been trying to find a way into the game for years. That path opens when K is approached by billionaire Alan Scarpio, the alleged winner of the sixth iteration. Scarpio says that something has gone wrong with the game and that K needs to fix it before Eleven starts or the whole world will pay the price.
Five days later, Scarpio is declared missing. Two weeks after that, K blows the deadline and Eleven begins. And suddenly, the fate of the entire universe is at stake.

I’m not sure I’m actually up to the task of righting a Rabbits review, but I’ll give it a shot!

Rabbits is both the name of this novel and the name of the game within the novel. Rabbits — the game — is secretive and mysterious. No one knows for sure if it actually exists, who created it, how you play, who has played, or how you win. Yet there are countless online discussion groups devoted to Rabbits, as well as countless die-hard gamers who live and breathe for the opportunity to find out more and maybe even get to play.

K, the main character of the book, holds regular workshops on Rabbits in a Seattle arcade, where he reveals rare recordings and shares the lore of the game. It’s all based on rumors and hearsay and dark web conspiracies, but K is more successful than most. Gifted since birth with the ability to see and recognize patterns and connections, he’s highly skilled when it comes to recognizing the anomalies and seeming coincidences that are so crucial to Rabbits.

K also presents as being somewhat imbalanced, losing time, having strange freakouts, and becoming so obsessed with clues and the game that he forgets to eat or sleep. As the book opens, K receives a strange warning from a tech billionaire rumored to be a winner of an earlier iteration of the game. He states that there’s something wrong with the game, that it’s up to K to fix it, and that if he doesn’t, the world may be doomed. No pressure though!

We follow K and his maybe-girlfriend Chloe through a baffling series of symbols, puzzles, and patterns as they work to solve the riddle of Rabbits and, hopefully, to keep the multiverse from imploding. Reading Rabbits, I couldn’t help thinking that it’s sort of a Da Vinci Code kind of mystery wrapped up in gamer-speak, with a techno-thriller pace and edge to it all.

Rabbits is incredibly confusing, and to be honest, I don’t think I could actually tell you what Rabbits — the game — actually is or how someone wins. The book is convoluted as heck, although I can’t say it doesn’t have enjoyable moments. The mindfuckery is leavened by funny dialogue and pop culture references — in between all the parts that left me scratching my head and utterly bewildered. More often than not, I found myself incredibly impatient with all the twists and turns, and I just couldn’t suspend disbelief enough to buy into the idea that these hidden clues could actually make sense to a real person.

I think maybe I’m just not the right audience for Rabbits. The book is long, and while there are some fun passages and escapades, overall it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. I will say, though, that it’s made me hypersensitive right now to patterns and coincidences… like why do I always happen to be glancing at a clock when it’s 9:20?

Maybe it’s the game. Maybe I’m playing and I don’t even know it!

Final note: Rabbits is also the name of a podcast created by the novel’s author, Terry Miles. I haven’t listened to it, and understand from the book’s marketing that it’s not necessary to have listened to the podcast to read the book — but it’s also about the game Rabbits. The podcast can be found at: https://www.rabbitspodcast.com/

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1Oct2020

Book Review: The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher

Posted in Book Reviews by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Title: The Hollow Places
Author: T. Kingfisher
Publisher: Gallery/Saga Press
Publication date: October 6, 2020
Length: 352 pages
Genre: Horror
Source: Review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley

A young woman discovers a strange portal in her uncle’s house, leading to madness and terror in this gripping new novel from the author of the “innovative, unexpected, and absolutely chilling” (Mira Grant, Nebula Award–winning author) The Twisted Ones.
Pray they are hungry.
Kara finds these words in the mysterious bunker that she’s discovered behind a hole in the wall of her uncle’s house. Freshly divorced and living back at home, Kara now becomes obsessed with these cryptic words and starts exploring the peculiar bunker—only to discover that it holds portals to countless alternate realities. But these places are haunted by creatures that seem to hear thoughts…and the more you fear them, the stronger they become.
With her distinctive “delightfully fresh and subversive” (SF Bluestocking) prose and the strange, sinister wonder found in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, The Hollow Places is another compelling and white-knuckled horror novel that you won’t be able to put down.

One word review: Creepy.

Five word review: Scary. Snarky. Weird. Nightmarish. Un-put-downable.

But let me expand a little…

In The Hollow Places, Kara (known as Carrot by her uncle and close friends) is recently divorced and without a place to live. Her uncle Earl runs a totally awesome-sounding small-town museum (Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities and Taxidermy). It’s a mish-mosh place full of (yes) taxidermied animals, fossils, relics, weirdness, and whatever people choose to send him. Earl is a sweetheart of a man, a total believer in whatever strangeness he comes across, but also kind-hearted and accepting and unconditionally loving when it comes to Kara.

Earl invites Kara to come live in the spare room at the back of the museum and help him with cataloguing and inventory. With so many positive memories of her time with Earl during her childhood, Kara is happy to accept. The taxidermy in the museum feels like being surrounded by old friends (and does not creep her out in the slightest, like it would for me!).

When Earl has to leave for a few weeks to get knee surgery, that’s when the weirdness starts. One day, Kara discovers a hole in a section of the drywall, which she attributes to clumsy tourists. Enlisting the help of Simon, the friendly and slightly odd barista next door, she plans to repair the hole… until they look inside it and see not the expected boards and plaster, but a corridor.

And it’s a corridor that should be impossible. Kara knows the layout of the building perfectly, and there just isn’t room for a long hallway like this. Naturally, they decide to explore, and end up in a bunker that opens onto an island in a river… in another world.

The world they discover is immediately disconcerting. There are willow trees everywhere, and the river is filled with small humped islands that appear to all contain bunkers. The sand has weird funnel-shaped holes, and there’s something just completely otherworldly and alien about this place.

The more they explore, the more horrors they discover, and they soon realize that they may not be able to get back to their own world.

I won’t go into too much more detail about the terror of this willow world, or what happens next, but it’s SCARY AF and gave me nightmares, for real. And despite the nightmares, I loved this book.

T. Kingfisher’s writing is funny and snarky, even when the circumstances are creepy and horrible. I love how Kara looks at the world, and some of the descriptions are laugh-out-loud hilarious, even in the midst of the terror.

Kara is a freelance graphic designer, and her worldview is amazing. Even while dealing with her disillusionment over her failed marriage and her jerk of an ex, she’s funny:

Dammit, I can’t believe I spent so much of my life on a man who would unironically post the line “Today is a gift, that’s why we call it the present.” And in Papyrus, too.

Simon is really fun too, and I love how he throws himself into the adventure with Kara, even while reminding them both how bad an idea this could be.

Come on, let’s go back to the coffee shop and I’ll make us Irish coffees and we’ll discuss this like people who don’t die in the first five minutes of a horror movie.

Even as hideous danger looms, Kara is still Kara:

It sounded slow. If I got to my feet and grabbed my cane, I could hobble away, and then we could have the slowest chase scene ever.

I read a good portion of this book in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep, and that pretty much guaranteed that I’d never be able to sleep again! Well, at least not that night.

The writing and the pacing are terrific, and the plot is weird and terrifying. The willow world is baffling and yet horrible, and there are certain descriptions that made me feel that I would drop dead of complete and utter fright if I found myself in Kara’s place.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that besides the awesomeness of Kara, Simon, and Uncle Earl, and of course the museum itself, there’s also a Very Good Cat named Beau who is all sorts of amazing in the most cat-like ways possible. I’m guessing the author is an animal lover, because her previous book, The Twisted Ones, had a Very Good Dog as an important character. (Rest assured, Beau is just fine by the end of this book. Beau is a bad-ass.)

The Hollow Places is a crazy disturbing read, but I mean that in the best possible way. A perfect read for the creepy-reading month of October!