Genre: Sci-Fi, Mystery
LGBTQ+ Identities: Trans, Gay
Reviewer: Scott
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About The Book
On the 3rd Orbital Anniversary, a mining ship vanished, never to be heard from again.
Twelve years later, Special Agent Evelyn Carlisle finds herself on the cusp of discovering what happened to it – if she can get the crew of the Galilean Moons Forensic Cleaning Company to talk.
A tale from the Jovian Empire.
The Review
Moore delivers another tightly written story in the Jovian Empire, building suspense with an interrogation of a forensic cleaning crew run by a clueless man named Urhines (I still don’t know how to pronounce that!) who has no idea what an idiot he is.
The Galilean Moons Forensic Cleaning Company is fresh off an off-the-books cleaning job, and the Jovian Bureau of Investigation has picked up Urhine’s ship to question the crew about the operation. Turns out they were tasked with cleaning an ass-crack… one of my favorited little pieces of world building here, short for asteroid cracker – that’s been missing for over a decade and may have discovered something horrific in the last asteroid it cracked.
The characters here are clearly drawn and all play their assigned roles well, as Evelyn, the JBI investigator, tries to play them against one another to figure out what happened on the long-missing ass-cracker in order to finally be able to go after Qanta, the company that owns the ship and hired the clean-up crew.
Balancing horror, suspense and comedy, this short story keeps you guessing up to the very end, and it managed to surprised me, which is a rarity these days. I love these little snippets in the Jovian Empire, each illuminating another little bit of this fascinating space nation.
Space horror, humor, and well-drawn characters create a story that’s hard to put down. Grab a copy and see for yourself, and then grab the other stories, The Courier and Can You Ever Forgive Me. You won’t be disappointed.
The Reviewer
Scott is the founder of Queer Sci Fi, and a fantasy and sci fi writer in his own right, with more than 30 published short stories, novellas and novels to his credit, including two trilogies.