Gold Rush Mystery.  Mit Sandru, author (Chivileri Publishing, 2015).  When I started this novella, I had some misgivings.  It’s probably just me, but I didn’t like the simple drawings and media interviews at the beginning.  Maybe some will see that as a clever way to do the background and/or get the story started.  I didn’t, but I continued.  I’m glad I did.  It became an entertaining and mysterious story that kept me interested until the end.

The background can be summarized as follows: the author is describing what the first steps might be for establishing a colony on the moon.  In many sci-fi stories, this is a fait accompli, and the protagonists move around in a colony that already exists.  Clarke’s A Fall of Moondust comes to mind; Heinlein, in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, turns this idea upside-down and makes the colony a prison.  This novella starts at the beginning with the first manned colony, but the “colonists” in the Gold Rush project find they’re not the first.  Armstrong and other friends aside, old Luna has had other visitors in the past, and their artifacts aren’t exactly benign to Humans at first.

I guess I’d classify the artifacts somewhere between the obelisk in Clarke’s 2001 and the corpse in the spacesuit in Hogan’s Inherit the Stars.  It’s great fun and a wee bit quirky at the end.  A recommended read in today’s impoverished sci-fi genre (all books I’ve mentioned are classics and should be read by all sci-fi addicts).  Hard sci-fi technical people will have to suspend belief a little, but remember Clarke’s maxim: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  There’s a wee bit of magic in them thar hills!  A copy of this novella was provided the author WITHOUT asking for a review, but I’m happy to give this one.  (I’d give this a PG-13 rating for those who worry about such things.)

Absolution.  Susan A. Fleet, author (Music and Mayhem Press, 2008).  This is where the Frank Renzi series started.  Fellow ex-Bostonian used her experiences in New Orleans to pen (Word-create?) an excellent thriller.  Frank Renzi, ex-Bostonian cop (he’s half-Italian and—what else?—half Irish), with a lot of baggage behind him, including a recent divorce and a beloved daughter, a medical student who has issues with that divorce, shows his mettle by not giving up on a case even when the FBI task force and publicity hound kicks him off it.

The case is unusual because the serial killer is unusual.  Catholic angst plays a big role along with the immense gap between the Catholic hierarchy and the priests who work in the trenches of social unrest.  There are other themes woven into this suspenseful plot too, including an answer to the question: what kind of woman can love a cop who maybe puts his work above his family relationships?  This is good, entertaining writing, folks, so I’ll check out other books in this series.  I bought this ebook for casual reading and am more than happy to review it.  Note: I didn’t steal the name for my Mayhem, Murder, and Music series of short stories from Susan—it just shows great minds think alike.  (Probably an R rating, but comparable to what you can get on cable.)

Raging Heat.  Richard Castle, author.  (Kingswell, a subsidiary of Hachette, 2014). This is #6 in the series supposedly written by the MC in the TV show Castle.  It’s formulaic: Nikki Heat is superhuman, Jameson Rook is a cynical lout, so readers of the series will fill right at home (for those not in the know, Castle’s characters are modeled after the main cop in the show and him).  It’s also entertaining.  If you can get past the gratuitous Heat in the bedroom (I love that pun), you’ll find an well plotted mystery, crime story, or who-done-it, whatever you want to call it (frankly better than the TV episodes, but that’s not a surprise).

Not much meat here outside the opening scene and Heat in the bedroom (I can’t help myself!), though, so you can probably get through it in one or two sessions and move on to something better.  By the way, let me record for all posterity that this is the perfect example of an ebook from a traditional publisher that has more editing errors than your average indie ebook—they obviously slap these together in sloppy fashion following the airline’s tactic of cutting back on the maintenance end.  (Probably an R rating, but comparable to what you can get on cable, just NOT on ABC—that has to be Mickey Mouse nice.)

In elibris libertas….

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