13 February 2025

Dead Silence by S. A. Barnes REVIEW

Summary:


Claire Kovalik is days away from being unemployed - made obsolete - when her beacon-repair crew picks up a strange distress signal. With nothing to lose and no desire to return to Earth, Claire and her team decide to investigate.

What they find is shocking: the Aurora, a famous luxury spaceliner that vanished on its maiden tour of the solar system more than twenty years ago. A salvage claim like this could set Claire and her crew up for life. But a quick search of the ship reveals something isn't right.

Whispers in the dark. Flickers of movement. Messages scrawled in blood. Claire must fight to hold onto her sanity and find out what really happened on the Aurora before she and her crew meet the same ghastly fate.


My Thoughts:


This was such a breath of fresh air and exciting to read. The story goes back and forth between past and present of Claire telling her story. Rejected from the multiple jobs in space she applied for, Claire has to head back to Earth for an office job - something she never wanted to do. She likes the silence and peace of being out among the stars with little to no human interaction. Her crew is against going to assist the distress signal, but their minds change when they see the ship. They could make a lot of money taking things from it, and the families of the dead on board would finally know what happened to their loved ones. But upon entering the ship, Claire starts to see and hear things. This isn't abnormal for her, as she has the ability to see ghosts, but something is different about it this time. When her crew starts experiencing the same, it becomes a battle to continue their mission without going crazy.

I like the development of Claire and her crewmate Kane, who are the main focuses of the novel. We get to know things about their pasts and their life before this mission. Claire is the sole survivor of a tragedy that killed her mother, and Kane is a single father with a daughter on Earth. Claire is telling the story because she was found in an escape pod without her crew to Verux officials, who want to know what happened and why she is alone. They don't believe her about seeing things on the ship, of course, but they need a statement and want to go find the ship. Near the end, they convince her to go with them to get it so she can show them where everything is - but it turns out that they want to take some things and explode the ship with her on it. The disappearance of the ship and the deaths of the passengers wasn't an accident - they were experimenting with sound waves, which made the people on board crazy and start killing each other. Claire has to grab Kane and try to escape before they blow up the ship.


My Rating: 5 stars

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