The Ark

December 14, 2015
When a conspiracy threatens the last shreds of humanity, salvation comes in the form of a sports star turned detective. Tomlinson's debut novel follows the exploits of Bryan Benson, the much-beloved detective of Avalon, one of two habitat modules on the Ark spaceship that's carrying humans away from a doomed Earth. As the Ark's bourgeois crew prepares to finally land on an alien planet, a geneticist is reported missing. When Benson tugs at the thread of the mystery, his entire reality unravels around him, and he delves into the underbelly of the Ark to find the truth among stolen paintings, partisan politics, and a cult leader who threatens to destroy everything Benson loves. Tomlinson's pacing is beyond reproach, as he deftly crafts an ever more elaborate web of intrigue within the self-contained setting. The book's few, small hiccups crop up mainly when Tomlinson attempts to work in a piece of 20th-century pop culture that's simply out of sync with his timeline, or when his word choice becomes repetitive. Tomlinson's female characters are refreshingly nuanced, and his use of Chekov's (sometimes literal) gun is sound enough to gloss over the rough patches in this impressive first novel. Agent: Russell Galen, Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency.

November 15, 2015

The case of a missing person should be unheard of on the generation ship known as the Ark. Bryan Benson, chief of security for the Avalon habitat, is determined to find out what happened to the missing lab tech, Edmond Laraby. Benson's investigation will draw him into deep waters, pitting him against the ship's elite crew, all of whom seem determined to keep their own secrets as the ship enters its final approach to Tau Ceti G, the new home for what is left of the human race. VERDICT A murder on a spaceship is the ultimate locked-room mystery, and debut author Tomlinson has a lot of fun dragging his detective all over the ship as he investigates who killed Laraby. The ending seems abruptly out of scale as the author reminds us he's writing sf and not just a tidy little mystery, but it sets up the rest of the series.--MM

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