I just finished reading The Warrior’s Knife, by Eric Thomson. Set seventy years after the end of When the Guns Roar, the latest (and possibly last?) book in his Sibohan Dunmoore series, The Warrior’s Knife is a first-person novel from the perspective of a detective investigating the murder of an alien dignitary on a human space station.
It was all right.
To be perfectly honest, I’ve read better sci-fi detective stories, but I’ve also read worse. Thomson comes at it from a military angle, as you might expect from his background, and the espionage and politics of the situation get kind of muddled. The main character spends a lot of time investigating leads only to have them go nowhere which, while definitely realistic, isn’t a very satisfying read. I’d have preferred more action and more actual progress on the case instead of a lot of shifty back-and-forth with characters who might or might not be suspects, but hey, it was still a decent sci-fi detective story, and I don’t get nearly enough of those. I suspect that The Warrior’s Knife might have suffered in my estimation because I went to the theater to watch Knives Out while I was in the middle of reading it, and thus suddenly had higher standards for mystery stories.
(Knives Out is a really good movie, by the way. You should go see it if you haven’t already.)
I bought the first book in Thomson’s Decker’s War series at the same time that I bought The Warrior’s Knife, but honestly I think I might wait to read it at this point. This was my seventh book in the same universe by the same author, and I think I want to switch things up a bit. I’ve got a few other books that I bought and downloaded and then never got around to reading: maybe I’ll pick up one of those now, and go on a fantasy adventure instead of a sci-fi one. We’ll see.
On a side note, if anyone has recommendations for more sci-fi detective stories, I’d love to hear them.