The Cold Between

[sawyl]

Another Easter read in the form of Elizabeth Bonesteel's The Cold Between. A solid slice of space opera, it includes aspects of a detective novel, a growing romance between two of the leads, an unrequited one the part of another, a complex conspiracy theory, and ends with some suitable feats of derring-do.

With the Central Corps starship Galileo in orbit around the colony of Volhynia, Captain Greg Foster has given his crew some much needed shore leave. Chief Engineer Elena Shaw, recovering from a bad breakup with one of fellow crew members, meets a nice guy in a bar and goes home with him. Then, next morning, Elena's ex shows up dead in a dirt-side alley and her new friend, Trey Zajec, is arrested for murder; despite having no evidence, the police have assumed that because Trey used to be a member of PSI, a paramilitary group who fall somewhere between being vigilantes and aid workers.

Determined to rescue her friend, Elena storms into the police station and declares that Trey cannot be guilty because they were together at the time of the murder. Unfortunately the local sheriff decides that if Danny Lancaster was Elena's ex-boyfriend, that gives her new one a strong motive for killing him. Elena manages to get Trey out of prison and the pair start digging into Danny's on-planet activities, discovering that he seems to have cooked up a grand conspiracy about a nearby pulsar; a pulsar which just happens to have triggered the destruction of the CCSS Phoenix twenty years before, where Kate Foster, Greg's mother, was serving as Chief Engineer.

Meanwhile all is not well back in orbit. For the last few months, Captain Foster has been receiving anonymous notes claiming that the destruction of the Phoenix was not caused by a stardrive failure but was part of a cover-up of something else. Weighed down by this and by Commander Shaw's impulsive criminal investigation down on the planet, Foster doesn't seem to notice the threat posed by Will Valentis, his second in command who has also spent the last six months working a secret investigation for Earth's Shadow Ops division. Not that Valentis' stymied ambitions would matter but for a section of the crew seconded from the starship Demeter by Valentis as part of the mysterious errand that brought the Galileo to Volhynia in the first place.

I liked The Cold Between very much: a good plot that rattles along quickly and strong characters who behave like grown-ups. Volhynia is well imagined as the poster child for colonisation outside the heavy-handed control of Earth — something that makes it clear just what the rest of the galaxy must be like under the rule of the mother planet. There are some problems — I can't quite bring myself to believe that Foster doesn't see Will Valentis coming — and I'm still not entirely sure of the precise details of what PSI is, but neither of these detract from what is a very solid first novel.