3.5 out of 5 stars
For some reason, there have been a lot of “murder mysteries in space” books in my queue lately. Gunpowder Moon was another one to add to the list. This was on my list of “most anticipated” for 2018 and I’m glad it was. I enjoyed almost every second of it thanks to Pederiera’s no-nonsense writing style and Jeffrey Kafer’s delivery.
I called this a Sci-Fi Political Thriller/Murder Mystery because that is every category I think this book fits into. There is a murder of a miner on the moon and we are tasked with figuring out not only who killed him but why. The government gets involved and it spirals from there.
The plot of this wasn’t anything new to me since I’ve read a few other books similar to this in the last few months – but I did appreciate that it was set on the Moon and not Mars. That helped it stand out a little to me (and made it a little more believable). There was some science in this that I wasn’t sure if it was real or possible – and some other science-y parts that bugged me a little. I don’t expect every author to be Andy Weir level of science by any means. Or even capital S science. But some of the stuff written in this just got on my nerves. I understand that it’s set in the future and “anything is possible” but it’s not the Sci-Fi parts that were the issue.
The characters were a little take them or leave them until later in the story. I didn’t know much about most of these people until they were thrown into the blender. It wasn’t typically how I get to know them – but it worked for this story.
Overall, for a genre-jumping book – I thought that Gunpowder Moon was a pretty good one. There was a little too much political pandering for my likes – but I just got past it and enjoyed the Sci-Fi Mystery part of it.