The Apollo Murders / Chris Hadfield

 

The Apollo Murders by Chris Hadfield
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

3.5 stars?

Let me preface this review by saying that thrillers are really not my genre. This novel is well written and Chris Hadfield has proven himself to be a very well rounded guy, more creative than I would expect given his military and astronaut background. During the early pages of this novel, I found myself checking Wikipedia in order to determine Hadfield‘s age. Sure enough, he's two years my senior, and that's what I would have guessed from the time period he chose to write about. The years of Richard Nixon, Apollo space missions, and Russo-American rivalry. The stuff we grew up in. The choice of an alternative history, where another Apollo mission occurred, was an inspired choice for him.

Hadfield is almost uniquely qualified to write this book, former test pilot, astronaut, and commander of the ISS. He obviously has a good grasp of space history, both Russian and American. He speaks Russian, having spent time on both Mir and the ISS and in Star City, Russia. In short, he knows how the Russian space program, NASA, and astronauts look, sound, and act. He can keep it real. Especially that “you can have emotions on your own time" ethos that seems to govern the space program. Hadfield manages to shoehorn in a couple of female characters. One rather minor one is a geologist involved in the lunar program, who becomes a love interest for the more prominent CAPCOM, Kaz. The other is a female cosmonaut who provides much of the opposition needed for the book's purpose.

I struggled to stay engaged because for me there were far, far too many technical flying details included. The folks who do care about such things will have a field day dissecting his descriptions. Whenever I set the book down, it was hard work to convince myself to pick it back up again. That, however, is me, not the book or the author. When the book first came out, Hadfield was all over Canadian public radio, doing the publicity for it—I am unsurprised that he said that thrillers were his preferred genre. He has studied them well and has a well structured book with excellent tension and he threw in some imaginative twists. Don't judge the book by my rating. My ratings reflect my enjoyment of the reading experience, not the quality of the book.

The pressure in the last few chapters is intense, the action nonstop. It was such a relief, to see the end in sight, and to read the final reveal. The book has garnered a lot of attention due to the author—there are 554 people waiting for it at my library. I don't know if Hadfield has plans to write another novel, but this one is good enough that I expect there would be an appetite for it.



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