A murder on the moon leads a lunar engineer into the crosshairs of a global conspiracy in this acclaimed sci-fi thriller.
The Moon smells like gunpowder. Every lunar walker since Apollo 11 has noticed it. Caden Dechert, the chief of the U.S. mining operation on the edge of the Sea of Serenity, thinks the smell is just a trick of the mind—a reminder of his harrowing days as a Marine in the war-torn Middle East back on Earth.
It’s 2072, and lunar helium-3 mining is powering the fusion reactors that are bringing Earth back from environmental disaster. But competing for the richest prize in the history of the world has destroyed the oldest rule in space: Safety for All. When a bomb kills one of Dechert’s diggers on Mare Serenitatis, the haunted veteran goes on the hunt to expose the culprit before more blood is spilled.
But as Dechert races to solve the first murder in the history of the Moon, he gets caught in the crosshairs of two global powers spoiling for a fight. Reluctant to be the match that lights this powder-keg, Dechert knows his life and those of his crew are meaningless to the politicians. Even worse, he knows the killer is still out there, hunting.
“Interesting quirks and divided loyalties flesh out this first novel in which sf and mystery intersect in a well-crafted plot.” —Library Journal, starred review
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Gunpowder Moon
A murder on the moon leads a lunar engineer into the crosshairs of a global conspiracy in this acclaimed sci-fi thriller.
The Moon smells like gunpowder. Every lunar walker since Apollo 11 has noticed it. Caden Dechert, the chief of the U.S. mining operation on the edge of the Sea of Serenity, thinks the smell is just a trick of the mind—a reminder of his harrowing days as a Marine in the war-torn Middle East back on Earth.
It’s 2072, and lunar helium-3 mining is powering the fusion reactors that are bringing Earth back from environmental disaster. But competing for the richest prize in the history of the world has destroyed the oldest rule in space: Safety for All. When a bomb kills one of Dechert’s diggers on Mare Serenitatis, the haunted veteran goes on the hunt to expose the culprit before more blood is spilled.
But as Dechert races to solve the first murder in the history of the Moon, he gets caught in the crosshairs of two global powers spoiling for a fight. Reluctant to be the match that lights this powder-keg, Dechert knows his life and those of his crew are meaningless to the politicians. Even worse, he knows the killer is still out there, hunting.
“Interesting quirks and divided loyalties flesh out this first novel in which sf and mystery intersect in a well-crafted plot.” —Library Journal, starred review
A murder on the moon leads a lunar engineer into the crosshairs of a global conspiracy in this acclaimed sci-fi thriller.
The Moon smells like gunpowder. Every lunar walker since Apollo 11 has noticed it. Caden Dechert, the chief of the U.S. mining operation on the edge of the Sea of Serenity, thinks the smell is just a trick of the mind—a reminder of his harrowing days as a Marine in the war-torn Middle East back on Earth.
It’s 2072, and lunar helium-3 mining is powering the fusion reactors that are bringing Earth back from environmental disaster. But competing for the richest prize in the history of the world has destroyed the oldest rule in space: Safety for All. When a bomb kills one of Dechert’s diggers on Mare Serenitatis, the haunted veteran goes on the hunt to expose the culprit before more blood is spilled.
But as Dechert races to solve the first murder in the history of the Moon, he gets caught in the crosshairs of two global powers spoiling for a fight. Reluctant to be the match that lights this powder-keg, Dechert knows his life and those of his crew are meaningless to the politicians. Even worse, he knows the killer is still out there, hunting.
“Interesting quirks and divided loyalties flesh out this first novel in which sf and mystery intersect in a well-crafted plot.” —Library Journal, starred review
A former reporter for newspapers including the Tampa Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times, David Pedreira has won awards for his writing from the Associated Press, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association, and the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He lives in Tampa, Florida.
It’s amazing how progress sneaks up on you. Not so long ago, stories about manned missions to Mars were purely speculative. Today, in the wake of Andy Weir’s The Martian and the ongoing work of SpaceX and other “space tourism” efforts, stories about people living on Mars seem much closer to reality. Frank Kittridge, former […]
If 2017 disappointed us in a lot of ways, we can’t say it didn’t introduce to a whole stack of amazing debut novels, and we have no reason to expect that 2018 will be any different. While it’s easy enough to mark down, say, Iron Gold on your TBR list, it’s tougher to predict what debuts […]
For two decades, Jim Killen has served as the science fiction and fantasy book buyer for Barnes & Noble. Every month on Tor.com and the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, Jim shares his curated list of the month’s best science fiction & fantasy books.
Murder…on the moon! That’s the enticing, deceptively simple hook to David Pedreira’s debut novel Gunpowder Moon, but the book goes low-gravity leaps and bounds beyond the catchy premise—first by creating a compelling, convincing picture of life on our orbiting neighbor in the very near future, then using the mystery of a dead miner to extrapolate […]
