Thanks to Netgalley for giving me this book a shamefully long time ago!

I cannot believe it took me this long to get to this book! (Well, actually I can considering my TBR list numbers in the multiple hundreds.)

BUT, had known how awesome this book is, I would have bumped it up the list!

A mash up of genres, the description of sci-fi noir seems most fitting for The Dark Side. It is fun and fast paced with two main plots that come together fairly well at the end.

The first is the new police lieutenant Justus (rhymes with Eustace, NOT justice lol) trying to find out what is wrong in the colony of Purgatory on the moon, specifically in the city of Sin. Picture Las Vegas, Sodom and Gomorrah, and the entire nation of Australia when it was a penal colony rolled into one. He continues to run up against brick walls, not least of which because nearly everyone in the city (even the police force) is a former/current criminal who has been transplanted there from Earth, and the creator of it, Fletcher Brass, is the biggest crook of all.

The second plot thread is a crazed killer android who is murdering his way across the moon killing dozens of short lived but fairly well developed characters. What this robots intentions are is unclear for most of the book but in spite of the horrific nature of his killings (or maybe because of them?) his sections are engaging.

I would recommend this to those who like to read fast paced stories with well developed characters and world building.

Loved It For the Dark Side, Not the Noir Side

I very much enjoyed every other chapter in this book, and the rest was fine, if uninspired.

We have a number of things going on here. As to the noir, we have a good cop in a corrupt town trying to solve a series of murders. As to the sci-fi side, our corrupt town is situated on the dark side of the Moon, and a lot of the action takes place on the open lunar surface. As to the darkly comic, we have an amnesiac android who takes sayings about business-as-the-art-of-war literally, and becomes a one-robot mayhem machine.

The noir plot is the weakest link. It's pretty standard and rolls along mostly on a lot of monologuing and explaining. That said, there are enough snappy conversations and deadpan dark throwaway lines to keep it reasonably interesting.

The lunar angle is terrific. O'Neill creates a fine and convincing Sodom, although all of the citizens of "Purgatory" seem to think they're badder and they're meaner than they actually are. Think Las Vegas with more tolerance of crime and lower gravity. But, a lot of action takes place outside of the Purgatory dome. There's the mag-lev train that takes you there. There are the scattered shacks in Gagarin Crater that house lifer killers from Earth in the most solitary of solitary confinement. There are various supporting characters who traverse the vast lunar emptiness. All of the scenes set out on the surface are exceptional. The atmosphere, the attention to detail, the care lavished on the backstories of all of these one-off supporting and incidental characters make this the high point of the book.

And the renegade android is a hoot. He takes literally such adages as "kill-or-be-killed". He is unfailingly polite and randomly and pointlessly deadly. As he works his way across the lunar surface on his way to Purgatory he leaves a trail of death and destruction, but it's all styled as though we are following a cheery psychotic killer Tinman on his way to Oz.

The book is organized in an episodic way. We get a chapter of background, then android, then good cop, then some more background, then a random character, then the android again, then back to the murder investigation - and so on. Ultimately we bring it all together at the end, as the solution is pretty obvious, but that's O. K. because the fun was in the journey.

I thought the book was worth it just for the opening chapters describing the overland trip to Purgatory, and then everything else was a bonus. So, to me, a solid entertaining find. (Please note that I received a free ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)