What adds some spice to this race to this last excursion to the Moon is the sudden death of one key player in the mission, a man whose possible murder raises all kinds of questions about who exactly has ended up on Apollo 18.
“As he watched the experts create one malfunction after another for the crew to deal with – before the launch, it was crucial that Tom, Luke and Michael see all the possible things that could go wrong and learn how to deal with them – he felt a little rueful that he was about to throw them the biggest mission curve ball ever.” (P.
In this slice of alternate history, the USA hasn’t curtailed the Apollo missions quite as early as it actually did with Apollo 18 actually going ahead – in reality missions 18 and 19 were cut due to budgetary constraints – and one last trio of men are off to the lunar surface to take samples and boldly go where only a handful of people have ever gone before. In truth the author’s foray into fiction is a gripping Cold War thriller set in an alternate 1973 where the US and USSR remain locked in a battle for space supremacy but in a way that is different to what actually took place during this time (though much of the fictional extrapolation have strong roots in actual events and feature actual players on the space race stage at the time).ĭrawing on his considerable experience as an astronaut, which lends even the more outlandish parts of The Apollo Murders an air of believable credibility, Hadfield invests the novel with the feel of a slow-burn thriller as simmering tensions about who will get to a bounty on the Moon boil over into a deadly race to the prize. Okay that’s not quite what The Apollo Murders is, and no doubt real-life Canadian author Chris Hadfield, who has made quite a name for himself in recent years with great space-centric non fiction reads, might wonder how you might shoehorn Miss Marple into a spacesuit and find space for a cast of eccentrically possibly guilty characters in a small reusable capsule. (cover image courtesy Hachette Australia)
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