Interesting premise, I wanted to love it. Perhaps I need to come back to this one? Not sure if this is a case of it's not you, it's me?

Engaging and entertaining. A recommended purchase for collections where sci fi is particularly popular.

The premise of the book was intriguing, and it started out so strongly that I had high hopes for it. But the energy just kind of fizzled out by the end and I had to push myself to finish it.

I very much appreciate being gifted this copy of Far from the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson, and the opportunity to read & review it. Thanks to the publisher.

Tade Thompson continues to write some of the best books available today. An excellent stand-alone, and very highly recommended.

Something about this - pacing or structure - fell apart in the back half, but I was pleasantly surprised by the front half. The author's note at the end warmed me to the effort, particularly the character of Shell. This isn't a bad book. The writing is very sparse and keeps the characters and events at a distance; fundamentally I felt this is a developed version of the document that results from an idea dump more than a fully developed novel. There was such interesting stuff in here but we flit around far too much to appreciate it. Countless POVs alternating in short chapters try to give a superficial grasp of the world, when a more focused one in greater depth would have made this premise really sing for me.

Of the characters, I most enjoyed Fin and Salvo, who felt fully formed in their relationship with each other and as individuals. I did not care for Fin's hackneyed romance arc with Joké, which felt like the result of a session 0 decision in an RPG to connect two characters somehow. Lawrence was not developed enough for me to have emotions about, and though the note made me like Shell better, her inner life was not detailed enough to make her background felt like it mattered to her arc. I liked Ragtime; it was a very pleasant take on an AI and functioned well as a vehicle for worldbuilding.

I liked Molly Southbourne because it was character-driven, if not depth-focused. Rosewater was character-driven as well, but I think at its heart was setting-focused; there was a particular context the author wanted to tell this story within. This book, meanwhile, was driven wholesale by setting and context. It's why we jump constantly around, and have a stronger sense of what's changed about the world than about where any of the characters are going to wind up at the book's end. This isn't even a true mystery, with more thriller & sci fi action beats than mystery red herrings or much salient investigation done. Too many weird sci fi things are happening that distract from the murders, which are (in a way) solved very early; all doubt is removed about 60% in. A crime story set in space and backdropped against a post-Nigerian civilization, and mysterious, yes; but not really a mystery. Expectations were set and not met; this is this book's biggest crime.

Sex functions in this book to create a bond that makes these characters matter to each other, and to my memory it functioned the same way in Rosewater. A shorthand of sorts. The brief description of imagined sex with a demon in this book makes a sort of sense when you realize the author is a psychiatrist; in this case, too, perhaps this functioned as shorthand to tell us about the character's mindset or experiential processing. It didn't work for me, but there's a reasonable chance that's reader error.

A good world and imaginative details neglected by a set-up and follow-through that felt like they existed under different principles. I would have liked to read the hypothetical second book of this series if it had been the first.

I love a locked-room sci-fi thriller! When the human second-in-command of a colony ship, Shell Campion, wakes from 10 years of hypersleep, she discovers the ship's AI captain has malfunctioned and 30-odd passengers are dead. Who killed them? And why? The first half is tighter than the second, but that didn't stop this from being an overall excellent read as far as I'm concerned. I could barely put it down, wanting to find out what would happen next. Not totally sold on all the outcomes and resolutions, but still. Well worth reading.

3.5 stars. I was going to give it a flat 3 stars but I upped it because of the originality of the story alone. This was good. Space thriller? Sign me up. I enjoyed it for what it was, I didn't enjoy it for what I THOUGHT it was going to be. I will keep an eye out for future work though.

A new favorite author of mine, Tade Thompson absolutely shines in this book. I can’t wait to see what they write next.

The premise of the book sounded interesting and I generally love a space mystery/thriller setup. However, I found myself uninterested in the events happening. I also found that the payoff wasn't really worth it and the reveal felt like it came out of nowhere.

The characters felt bland and one-dimensional. There are a few different POVs in this novel but I found they each lacked a distinct voice or personality. The biggest problem I had was the lack of suspense and atmosphere. Everything seemed to happen matter-of-factly and despite being in a dangerous, life-threatening situation, all the characters were pretty calm and nonsense about the whole thing. Strange things were clearly happening in the story but it didn't feel remarkable and as a reader, I didn't feel a sense of urgency or danger.

Overall, this book left me feeling ambivalent and only mildly interested in the mystery.

Incredibly imaginative and unique--I enjoyed this world, with its travel to other planets and space stations. It's futuristic, but not so much that everything is unfamiliar and confusing. This is the level of scifi that I enjoy, where everything is taking place maybe 100 years or so in the future.

Buuuuut.....there were some major pacing/editing issues here. Most of the book is focused on a whodunnit type mystery, and the resolution comes out of nowhere with a huge info dump that takes up 10% of the book (yes, I counted the pages). The story is compelling, but the lack of progress in the mystery makes the middle half of the book drag as the characters just kind of meander around and discover new random problems.

I like the found-family, scrappy group of protagonists that come together to try and solve the mystery and save the spaceship, but most of them are underdeveloped. There are major character reveals that go nowhere. There is a random romance/coupling that doesn't make much sense.

There's some really good stuff here, but the author was trying to do too much with too many characters, and it reads like a first draft. However, I like the ideas that are here and would read more from him in the future!

Shell is on her first trip as captain if a space ship to the colony planet of Bloodroot. When she wakes, she discovers that the AI controlling the ship is offline and there passengers that have been removed from their space travel pods and killed. When an out of job investigator from Bloodroot comes aboard to determine what happened, they are soon embroiled in a fight for their life with an unknown enemy.

This was okay. The locked-room murder mystery in space is a great premise and after I got used to the writing style, which was a bit blunt, I was invested. The murder mystery part itself was engaging, despite it not being very character focused. However, this story had a lot of elements that were supposed help world build, but instead ended up being a lot of loosely tied together threads that don't serve much purpose. I did end up staying engaged in the story, but the story could've been tighter.

Thank you to Orbit and Netgalley for the e-copy.

Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author Tade Thompson delivers a new standalone novel that is both a significant departure from his recently completed Wormwood trilogy while also retaining the same style and strong characterization that has made him an author to watch.

Michelle “Shell” Campion is a copilot on her first interstellar flight aboard the Ragtime, on what was supposed to be a simple mission: deliver one thousand colonists to the planet Bloodroot, while the AI captain does the heavy lifting as everyone is in stasis. Instead, she wakes up to find her AI pilot has malfunctioned, the ship is barely functional, and that thirty-one of those passengers have been hacked into pieces.

Rasheed Fin is a detective on suspension, expecting a call from his boss informing him he’s being terminated. Instead, his boss calls with an assignment—to investigate what went wrong aboard the Ragtime. Succeed, and he’ll be reinstated—fail, and he’ll share the blame. He heads into orbit with his AI assistant Salvo, expecting an open-and-shut case of a rookie who cracked under pressure, only to find solving what happened to be a far bigger puzzle.

Things begin to rapidly go wrong aboard the Ragtime—key systems fail, the maintenance robots attack them, and there’s even a wolf prowling the corridors of the ship. They’ll have to work together to clear both of their names and to keep the ship functioning long enough to find out the truth behind these killings.

A sinister mystery is playing out aboard the ship, and big decisions will have to be made, putting countless lives in the balance, perhaps chief among them, their own.

A locked-room murder mystery that moves at a brisk pace, Far From the Light of Heaven makes for an interesting whodunnit with the added layer of a failing starship acting as a ticking clock. Taking its time to set things up, and cleverly subverting a few of the more standard solutions along the way—no Hal-style killer ship AI in this story, to name one—what’s left is a suspenseful mystery, helped along by an occasionally wicked sense of humor.

Of course, any good mystery is only as good as the dramatis personae, and Thompson has done a marvelous job fleshing out the characters in the story, each with a distinctive voice, motivations, and identity. This is especially true of Shell and Finn, whose wildly different perspectives and clashing personalities make for a wonderful dynamic. Both are experiencing a crisis of identity—for Shell, her inexperience at the helm, for Finn, his insecurities following his disastrous last job, and they’ll need to tackle both to get to the bottom of what’s going on.

For all the intrigue and mystery, the beating heart of the novel is its characters, and they’ll each find a way of sticking with you long after you’re done with the book.

Despite faltering just slightly toward the end, Far From the Light of Heaven brings more than enough to the table—a noir-esque mystery with a fascinating setup, and superb execution, and a cast of memorable, well-crafted characters—to make the journey worthwhile.

Locked room trope horror IN SPACE. This is a story about the brink of death.

This book was inspired by an Edgar Allen Poe story, and the author expertly creates a sense of claustrophobic dread, while simultaneously creating something of beautify. If you want to read a murder mystery masquerading as a speculative science fiction, I would totally recommend this one.

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️. 🌟

Thank you so much netgalley & orbit books for the eArc!

This book starts off with a bang and I was hooked! It is pretty much a murder mystery in space and I was really interested in solving the murder, along with the cast of characters. However, there were elements of the story that made this a bit of a challenging read. The characters were not fleshed out to the extent I would like, the plot was convoluted at times, and there were random plot points that took away from my enjoyment of the story. Having said that, this wasn’t a complete miss for me, so I’m giving it 3/5 stars.

Thank you NetGalley for giving me a copy of this book. I regret that this was another one that I didn't get around to finishing before it was published.

Far From the Light of Heaven was a decent book. I feel bad for my rating because I think that the biggest problem with this story is that it just wasn't what I was expecting. I picked it up hoping for a sci-fi, not a trapped in a space ship murder mystery. For what it actually is, it was entertaining, paced well, and pretty easy to understand and follow along with even if at times it just seems to be weird for the sake of being weird. It just didn't seem that interesting or original. I feel like this has all been done in other books and perhaps a bit better.

I didn't like the romance. It felt super unauthentic and unnecessary. I wish that it would have been left out completely since it didn't add a single thing to the story and just added in a very insincere feeling connection and relationship between two already underdeveloped characters. I wish that we also would have gotten more into the SPECIES in this book. The only character I actually semi- enjoyed was Joke, a pansexual alien. A couple other small characters, namely Lawrence and Salvo, were decent, but nothing out of the ordinary. For a book with so many characters, it's disappointing that the main ones didn't manage to stand out all that much or seem that well rounded or important..

I could see how some people could like this book and give it a much higher rating, but unfortunately for me, most of this just didn't work for what I as a reader, was interested in at the time.

TL;DR: Far From The Light of Heaven is a fast-paced murder mystery afrofuturist space opera with a satisfying twist and resolution. My rating: 4 of 5 stars.

Thompson has crafted another compelling future–this time, in space. Michelle Campion has followed in her father’s footsteps and become a spaceship captain. Her first trip as captain is supposed to be simple–the ship AI will pilot a colony ship from Earth to colony planet Bloodrot and Campion’s presence is a mere safety regulation, in the extreme unlikelihood that something goes wrong. Only something does go wrong.

Campion awakes from stasis to discover that her ship’s AI is unresponsive, some of her passengers have been dismembered, and the rest are in peril of losing life support systems before the murder can be solved. Soon reinforcements show up–a disgraced detective from Bloodrot along with Campion’s late father’s dear friend and his half-alien daughter–and they band together to uncover the truth of what happened on the ship. The character writing is good, but not particularly complex, and the romantic relationship seemed to come out of nowhere and served little purpose beyond checking a box marked romance.

The real stars of the book are 1.) a murder mystery plot that slowly grows to encompass not just the ship and Bloodrot, but also Earth-based corporate malfeasance and other political entities in the Lagos system, and 2.) intriguing sci-fi future details, like orphans raised by software moms and AI with violent agendas.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Orbit Books for giving me advance access to this book in exchange for an honest review.

3.5

Described as a locked-room mystery set in space, I would say this falls more into the thriller category than your traditional locked-room mystery. The world here is really interesting as are the characters but the action moves so fast that we don't get as much of either the world or the characters as I wanted. There is a certain choppiness to the story that I think adds to the pace/thriller aspects, but made the rest feel more distant.

The story itself is interesting, especially in its themes, but I wanted more.

There is a lot going on in this ambitious novel which is trying to be a closed-door murder mystery in space. And where it leans on its world-building and mostly optimistic science fiction vision, it’s very, very good indeed, but it isn’t that great a mystery, though despite that, it’s oddly satisfying.

There’s almost no way to discuss this book’s merits and particularly its failures without spoiling everything and I don’t want to do that because the ride is actually a fun one. And Thompson’s vision of the future where some of those who have left earth have managed to break free of the chains of capitalism to a certain extent is a very optimistic one.

This is no Star Wars or Bug hunt or scary aliens out to destroy earthmen book at all. This is a relatively optimistic future of successful colonization and exploration of other planets, where humans have learned to live in harmony with each other and their new worlds, except when colonies fail and those people move on.
Our protagonist is from earth, however. Shell Campion is a second-generation astronaut. Her father Hal disappeared on a deep space mission some years previously. Her brothers are also involved in spacefaring to a certain extent, but she was the one bound for NASA until she was recruited out of school by MaxGalactix the largest private spacefaring contractor. Instead of having to pay dues, she is fast-tracked to being Captain of the Ragtime, a sleeper ship with slightly over 1,000 passengers and some scientific experiments bound for the distant colony of Bloodroot, through the Dyson gates. It’s a 10-year journey each way (asleep), but once she returns to Earth she can write her own ticket for the rest of her career.

Everything goes as planned until Ragtime (the AI of which is one of the characters in the story) arrives in Bloodroot orbit and Shell awakens to find Ragtime AI unresponsive, 31 passengers dead and dismembered and a robot wolf roaming the ship’s halls.

Bloodroot quarantines them and sends up the investigative team of Rasheed Fin (human) and Salvo (Robot) to find out who murdered 31 people. Fin is clearly neurodivergent, which makes him very good at his job, and he and Salvo are friends who have worked together before and you get a real Holmes and Watson vibe off them.
They begin to unravel parts of the mystery only to be attacked by the ship’s robots. And, after sending an initial message back to space station Lagos that controls the Dyson gate and is governed by Shell’s Uncle Larry (her Dad’s best friend), the ship’s robots disable their communication tower so there’s no further communication with Lagos or Bloodroot possible. But Uncle Larry and his half-alien daughter Joke are already on the way, and they soon arrive at the Ragtime to try to help the situation.

So now you have 5 people stuck on a ship that is actively attacking them, trying to find out who killed everyone and who is trying to kill them as well.

This is just the set-up.

Note here. These are really interesting characters, but they all read pretty superficial because this is an action story. You get the best reads on Shell and Fin. I’d love to see this made into a film. It has that feel.
If you are expecting it to proceed as a normal whodunnit mystery, you’re going to be disappointed. It doesn’t follow that convention. It’s much more sociological science fiction. And that’s just fine. That works splendidly.
What you do get is the eventual introduction of the persons responsible for the disaster (which isn’t at all a straightforward murder) and a lot of discussion of the toxic downsides of capitalism and the military-industrial complex. Which, acknowledged, it got us to space. But what else did it do? This is a thinky book, in the best SF tradition. And bravo there.

There are also aliens involved in a very interesting way. They are not antagonists.

This novel is complex with a ton of moving parts, but it does come to a satisfying conclusion and while this story is completed in this novel, the world that exists has plenty of space for further stories set in it. I hope Thompson has plans to give us some. I would absolutely recommend this novel to people who enjoy SF. Hardcore mystery lovers will not enjoy it as much because of the way the mystery is unraveled and the way it doesn’t follow traditional mystery narratives.

Did not finish. I could not connect with Far from the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson. I will not be reading/finishing this one. Thank you, netgalley and publisher for the early copy!