Places in the Darkness by Christopher Brookmyre

Read the prologue and the first chapter at the Orbit website. It is 403 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. Places in the Darkness was published by Orbit on November 9, 2017. As the bodies pile up, and the partners are forced to question their own memories, Nikki and Alice begin to realize that gang warfare may not be the only cause for the violence. In charge of the murder investigation is Nikki “Fix” Freeman, who is not thrilled to have Alice Blake, an uptight government goody-two-shoes, riding shotgun. But not everyone aboard shares such noble ideals.īootlegging, booze, and prostitution form a lucrative underground economy for rival gangs, which the authorities are happy to turn a blind eye to until a disassembled corpse is found dancing in the micro-gravity.

Hundreds of miles above Earth, the space station Ciudad de Cielo - The City in the Sky - is a beacon of hope for humanity’s expansion into the stars. His first SF novel, Places in the Darkness, is a tale of mystery and murder on a vast orbital platform. Chris Brookmyre is a Scottish writer with some 20 mystery and thriller novels under his belt, including Dead Girl Walking and Where the Bodies Are Buried. The reason I bring this up today is because I recently bought another example in the same category, and it looks very promising indeed. I’m not the only one to have noticed - the Murder & Mayhem blog did a great piece on Rusted Chrome: 14 Sci-Fi Noir Books for Blade Runner Fans, just as an example. I heartily approve of this new trend towards SF noir. The Central Corps trilogy by Elizabeth Bonesteel - SFF World called the opening novel, The Cold Between, a “taut, space-based science fiction mystery” Richardson - The murder here isn’t really in orbit (it’s on an alien planet) but this one gets points for being extra-noir The Chaos of Luck by Catherine Cerveny - A Brazilian tarot card reader and a Russian crime lord race to stop a conspiracy on Marsīlood Orbit by K.R. Chen - A covert agent in the near-future forced to go on vacation to Mars The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts - Death, disappearances, and secret revolution on a far-future construction ship

Outer Earth by Rob Boffard - A thriller set on an overcrowded space station, from the author of the upcoming Adrift The Man in the Tree by Sage Walker – a police procedural murder mystery on a generation starship, by the author of the Locus Award-winning Whiteout Just in the last few months I’ve written about a cargohold full of futuristic noir, including: Police procedurals on alien planets, tense mysteries on far-future space stations, spy thrillers in the cold vacuum of space… that’s a whole lot of genre blending.

Murder in orbit seems to be the latest hot literary trend.

Places in the Darkness by Christopher Brookmyre