Tade Thompson - Far from the Light of Heaven

In his afterword to Far from the Light of Heaven Tade Thompson tells us he was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's classic lock-room story The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Thompson reasons that space was the ultimate lock-in environment and the novel is what flowed from that insight. The book begins strongly, with Michelle "Shell" Campion taking command of her first mission, the sleeper ship Ragtime. Ragtime arrives in orbit around its destination and Shell discovers that several dozen of the sleeping passengers have been murdered and the ship AI is behaving strangely. Alert the authorities to this they send up Rasheed Fin, a detective who proceeds to try and unravel the gruesome killings as the ship begins to fail around them. As his investigation proceeds, Fin finds that there are several people missing from the passenger manifest and Ragtime begins behaving very strangely indeed.

It's a great set up, but the novel feels incomplete. I found that Thompson introduced plot elements that seemed conjured out of thin air and didn't feel they fitted the universe he was building. The solution to the locked-in aspect of the mystery sees fairly obvious from early on, and I mostly read the book intrigued to find out how the author brought it all together. Unfortunately the ending was abrupt and unsatisfying. All in all I was disappointed with Far from the Light of Heaven having hoped for more from the intriguing premise.