Assassin’s Orbit by John Appel | 7/7/2021|Rebellion

The mark of a really good book is that you don’t want to put it down and you don’t want to finish it. That’s how I felt about Assassin’s Orbit, which I gather is John Appel’s debut novel. It covers a lot of ground, starting on a space station with a mass murder which includes high-ranked politicians and business types, moving to the planet’s surface as investigators track their suspects, and off into near space as some excellently plotted space war erupts.

There’s a lot going on here, and a large-ish cast of characters, all human, but very diverse, partly owing to the nature of the human diaspora hinted at early in the book and fleshed out towards the end. Suffice to say that a broad range of cultures predominates, but they’re all from the warmer places on Earth, whose fate isn’t totally clear but it’s probably not anywhere you’d want to be. The other aspect of diversity is that the cast is very multi-generational, and yes, a number of the main characters are women in their 60s. But some are younger, and a few are older and they’re all terrific.

There are two issues I do have with the novel, the first being that I had trouble keeping the characters straight, owing to a few of them having names that to me western trained eye looked similar and that the author switched back and forth between using their first and last names to describe of address them. By the time I was done I had the hang of it, but there was a bit of hanging on, and hoping I had it right in the meantime.

More critically I had issues with the publisher’s choices. The cover did not sell the book to me at all, coming off as an unappealing flip on the 2001 star child movie poster, whose main idea appears to have been to show that a person of color was in the book. Worse, to me, was their framing that the book is “Golden Girls meets The Expanse with a side of Babylon Five,” which is just weird. Not because there aren’t older women in the mix or that it takes place partly on a space station, but because the feel of the book is nothing like either. The Expanse reference is on target though.

Assassin’s Orbit is part police procedural, part geo-politics (both civil and interplanetary,) part spacewar, and part spy novel. All of which work together to form a really terrific space opera. If you’re looking for a simple plot with one or two main characters, this may put you off a bit, but if you’re looking for more than just a shoot-em-up in space (though there’s plenty of that here) this is an intelligent and impressive debut.

The story wraps up nicely, but the epilogue signals that there’s a next book, which I’m looking forward to.