BOOK REVIEW: Blood Orbit

So, I downloaded a the Kindle reader for my iPhone. I am not expecting to do a lot of reading on my phone, but a few books are hard to get in any other format and it is a fallback option for when I get stuck in a queue or something. To try it out I downloaded a novella called Blood Orbit by John Derderian. I saw an ad for it on ERECblog and the synopsis on Amazon is pretty compelling:

"Ted's life is simple, dull really. He is an independent shipper who hauls cargo around the solar system. Coasting in space for months at a time, and touching down only occasionally, he is safe even from the constant warfare on the planets below.

That is, until he wakes up to find his copilot brutally murdered. He can't imagine who would want to murder his friend, or even who could. Besides the two of them, there is nobody else on the ship.

Ted has two days until planetfall at Jupiter to come up with the answer -- to find a murderer who can't possibly exist. Otherwise, the authorities there -- the tyrannical megacorporations who control travel around the Solar System -- will pin the murder on him. In the meantime, the real murderer could still be on his ship...

Or is the answer the obvious one, that the murderer is Ted himself?"

So this is basically old-school sci fi meets closed room mystery. I found it fairly effortless to read on the small screen because it is tightly plotted, edge of the seat stuff and not much over 20,000 words. I would recommend this story to anyone who likes Bradbury, Asimov et al and also appreciated a good Sherlock-Holmes-style mystery. If this is where new SF epublisher Tricorp is setting the bar we can expect great things from this them!