Space Murder!

I'm a sucker for all things "space." So when I heard about a book called The Apollo Murders, with a cover featuring a lunar lander just above the moon's surface, that was basically all I needed to know to put it in my reading queue. (There was one other intriguing tidbit worth knowing, though: the author, Chris Hadfield, is a retired astronaut -- lending this decidedly fictional tale a patina of authenticity.)

For those of you who maybe need a little more info than I did, The Apollo Murders chronicles the events of (the never flown in real life) Apollo 18. A late-in-the-game crew change, a shocking encounter with Russian cosmonauts, and plenty of Cold War brinksmanship infuse this pulpy tale. This is Chris Hadfield's version of Andy Weir's formula: to infuse a science fiction story with lots and lots of true science fact detail.

Unfortunately, this book is not nearly as well written. The pulp element of this story is incredibly far-fetched, piling on wild twist after wild twist, each swinging harder than the last. You're asked to accept a lot of unrealistic turns in the plot that have little to do with actual science: from shockingly ineffective espionage agents to characters with thinly developed motives. Worst of all is a character who, as the novel unspools, becomes impossible to believe: I just couldn't accept that a raging psychopath of this magnitude would ever get to the place they get without detection.

This book made me appreciate more fully something about Andy Weir's writing that had slid under the radar for me until now. Weir's novels always feature characters using real-world science in science fiction situations. The Apollo Murders has more of an oil-and-water quality where the two elements remain separated. A fantastical tale is well-adorned with real-world details like a beautifully decorated Christmas tree, but truth rarely informs the fiction. It's as though Chris Hadfield wrote a wild "death in space!" story, then shuffled in a few pages from a memoir of his personal space travels.

The writing of the fiction isn't especially solid either. The narration seems especially omniscient, hopping around from one perspective to another whenever it pleases, often without even a new chapter or even a line break to queue you about what's happening. The characters, as I've said, are thin. The language is nothing special.

Although, I have to admit: the plot is thoroughly engaging. I knew as I was reading The Apollo Murders that I wasn't exactly "enjoying" it. But there was never a doubt in my mind that I had to know how it was going to end. And with so many wild plot twists in the mix, there was never a dull moment. This wasn't a not-great book that took me a while to finish; I breezed through it at escape velocity, my eyes pulling from the page only occasionally when I simply had to roll them.

I'd give The Apollo Murders a C. I'm certainly not here to tell all my readers to pick it up. But despite its shortcomings, I know there's a segment of my readership that almost certainly will get something out of it. If you're into the history of human-crewed space travel, and you, say, got swept up in Dan Brown mania many years ago and read The Da Vinci Code? (Mind you, this is at least better written and better plotted than The Da Vinci Code.) Then this might just be for you.