Book Cover from Amazon
Welcome to Outcast Station by Jeanne Adams and Nancy Northcott
BOOK BLURB ON AMAZON
Welcome to Outcast Station where even outcasts deserve a shot at redemption.
The Accidental Plague by Jeanne Adams
Outcast Station is a backwater, but for BVax Scientist Ravinisha Trentham, any posting is better than washing dishes. Ravi is top in her graduation class, but only Outcast would hire a McKeonite. Someone on the station wants her dead, but when a plague breaks out, Ravi may be their only hope. If the murderer gets to her first, everyone will die.
The New Badge by Nancy Northcott
Deputy Marshal Hank Tremaine crosses the wrong person and lands at Outcast Station, the armpit of Terran space. His hostile boss promptly assigns him to a backcountry murder. Solving it will help redeem his reputation and get him posted somewhere more civilized. But failing to find the killer will bury his career once and for all.
MY REVIEW
Welcome to Outcast Station is two stories in one. One on the station above the planet and one in the planet’s port and outback.
Jeanne Adams’ The Accidental Plague is a medical thriller in space, a race against time because “Plague knows no class, category, or status”. The new transfer has to take over when the senior scientist and half the staff succumbs over the very beds of those they are trying to save.
Typical of Ms. Adams, the story pops with relationships and action. I love her work and have read two novels by her.
Nancy Northcott’s The New Badge also finds the “new guy” in over his head real quick with a murder. The police procedural shows adding alien races to the mix doesn’t make police work any easier, DNA evidence depends on how a species sheds their DNA body bits and whoever killed the foreman in the agro-community didn’t leave much behind. Working against a no-waves supervisor, a too interested government official, and a local population where is he an outsider, the New Badge has his work cut out for him.
My first story by Ms. Northcott finds her effort a good example of the sci-fi police procedural.
Outcast Station may be where careers go to die, but promises to be an awesome place to sustain a share world.