Title: Paradise-1 (Red Space #1)

Author: David Wellington

Publisher: Orbit 2023

Genre: Scifi Horror

Pages: 688

Rating: 4/5 stars

Reading Challenges:

Paradise-1. Earth’s first deep space colony. For thousands of people, it was an opportunity for a new life. Until it went dark.

No communication has been received from the colony for months. And it falls to Firewatch inspector Alexandra Petrova and the crew of the Artemis to investigate.

What they find is more horrifying than anything they could have imagined.

I grabbed this from the library and did not quite realize how long it was going to be. I thought I had the large print version, but I did not. This book is a clunker, but also reads very quickly with zippy short chapters and tons of action. Almost too much action after awhile, but it definitely helped me keep reading this behemoth. We are introduced very quickly to our three (four?) main characters and dive into the journey. Things go bad very quickly. There’s very little set up to this book and I appreciated that we got right to the action. From there, we are in a nonstop race to survive in space. I loved figuring out the mystery of the basilisk and encountering its different versions. The summary makes it seem like most of the actions will take place on Paradise-1, but the characters don’t even make it to the surface until the last 20 pages. I guess I didn’t realize that this was the start of a series. Guess I will have to wait until whenever the next one will get published. I am definitely going to put this series on my watch list. If for nothing else, sometimes I need a breezy action/adventure novel.

Next up on the TBR pile: