I am going to admit something now. I don’t actually like to write book reviews. I consent to give a star rating on Goodreads, but writing actual reviews tends to leave me staring at my screen. Media consumption is deeply personal, and what one person loves another person may loathe, and far be it from me to tell you what that will be for you.

That being said, Erik and I are here to talk about the first fiction novel from astronaut Chris Hadfield, of “Space Oddity” fame. The book is called The Apollo Murders, and it’s set at the end of the Apollo era as NASA prepares for Apollo 18. The story mostly follows flight controller Kazimieras “Kaz” Zemeckis, a former test pilot who lost an eye in a freak bird collision which also dashed his hopes of becoming an astronaut.

NASA is in the middle of planning Apollo 18 when various intelligence and defense agencies step in to basically hijack the mission objectives. It seems the Soviets are doing something odd on the Moon, and NASA’s three-man team now has to go find out what that is. Erik will tell you more about the premise in a moment.

Here’s my contribution to this review: I haven’t finished the book. I read a book every two to three days, and I cannot seem to get into this one. I’m about 20% of the way in, and it’s a slog. It’s very insider baseball, which if that’s your thing, great. It is not, however, my thing and is one of the reasons I also found most Tom Clancy novels tedious. Hadfield knows a lot about both the history of NASA and the inner workings of the space programs, and even about Soviet locations and processes. And I do mean he knows A LOT. As he should.

But it’s boring. It’s overly technical to me, and while I can definitely feel Kaz’s excitement about being involved with the space program finally, it gets lost in all the technical writing. The only bit intriguing to me right now is the potential relationship developing between Kaz and a geologist assigned to the mission. She’s not an astronaut, but she wants to be, and at least Kaz is on her side for that. I want to skip through the book and see that relationship blossom. As it is, I’m not sure I’ll finish this book.

However, Erik did finish it, and he has thoughts. Erik?

Thanks, Beth. As she said, I managed to slog through the book. I know you’re supposed to let fiction do things you wouldn’t let reality do, but I just couldn’t suspend my disbelief at the premise of the mission of Apollo 18 as described in the book.

It was technically plausible, as I expected from someone with the knowledge of Chris Hadfield. It just seemed grossly unnecessary; there was no need for one mission to do all the things that it did in the book. Keeping all that a secret would be hard, and indeed in the book, the Soviets figure out the Americans’ deception rather quickly. More than one mission would be easy and having a secret second military spacecraft would have been more believable than doing everything on an Apollo lunar mission, to me. Several concepts and even programs with flight hardware contemporary to the era were available for Hadfield to choose from.

The rest of the events in the lunar mission are also suspense breaking, but what really made me almost put the book down was the gunfight in and around the capsule after landing. That was reckless but justified in the story by the valuable cargo they brought back.

Overall, I liked this book. The science and technical details were solid. Just not the action sequences.

More Information

The Apollo Murders (Amazon)