Member Review
Review by
Casey D, Reviewer
Wormhole is a detective story set in the context of man’s first venture outside our solar system. It’s a clever pairing of the intrigue of a murder mystery with the fascination of exploring a distant planet.
In the year 2194, Detectives Gordon Kemp and Danni Bellini are trying to solve cold cases in London. When they’re given an 80-year-old case, they find that the chief suspect is still alive, having been aboard a spaceship headed to a planet 50 light years distant, with its passengers cryogenically suspended. It turns out that the spaceship arrived and secretly stowed on board was a “quantum matrix,” which allowed a wormhole to be established between the distant planet and earth, so Kemp can travel to the planet instantaneously to track down his suspect, the dead man’s wife, a doctor.
We are treated with an interesting description of the new planet and the discovery that it is inhabited by sentient creatures and has an atmosphere that is deadly to those exposed to it without a biohazard suit. But the real story involves Danni, still on Earth and working with a lawyer-friend of Kemp’s and Kemp piecing information together on the new planet, to find that the whole trip to the planet was part of a plot by the real killer of the man 80 years previously. The story bounces back and forth between Danni’s investigation on Earth, Kemp’s adventures on the new planet, and the doctor’s experiences with the aliens who live there. It’s an exciting mystery, and I won’t give away its solution or too much of the details. In will say that the combination of learning about the unusual nature of the new planet and its inhabitants while trying to solve the murder mystery makes for an exciting story. The characters are well developed and likable, the mystery is suitably hard to unravel, and all, and there’s just enough strangeness and scientific speculation to make it real science fiction.
Thank you to NetGalley for making this book freely available to me to review.
In the year 2194, Detectives Gordon Kemp and Danni Bellini are trying to solve cold cases in London. When they’re given an 80-year-old case, they find that the chief suspect is still alive, having been aboard a spaceship headed to a planet 50 light years distant, with its passengers cryogenically suspended. It turns out that the spaceship arrived and secretly stowed on board was a “quantum matrix,” which allowed a wormhole to be established between the distant planet and earth, so Kemp can travel to the planet instantaneously to track down his suspect, the dead man’s wife, a doctor.
We are treated with an interesting description of the new planet and the discovery that it is inhabited by sentient creatures and has an atmosphere that is deadly to those exposed to it without a biohazard suit. But the real story involves Danni, still on Earth and working with a lawyer-friend of Kemp’s and Kemp piecing information together on the new planet, to find that the whole trip to the planet was part of a plot by the real killer of the man 80 years previously. The story bounces back and forth between Danni’s investigation on Earth, Kemp’s adventures on the new planet, and the doctor’s experiences with the aliens who live there. It’s an exciting mystery, and I won’t give away its solution or too much of the details. In will say that the combination of learning about the unusual nature of the new planet and its inhabitants while trying to solve the murder mystery makes for an exciting story. The characters are well developed and likable, the mystery is suitably hard to unravel, and all, and there’s just enough strangeness and scientific speculation to make it real science fiction.
Thank you to NetGalley for making this book freely available to me to review.
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