‘Making Waves’ by Thorne Moore

Published by FeedaRead,
12 February 2022.
ISBN: 978-1-80302-373-1 (PB)

A paragraph or two into this review, you could be forgiven for wondering if you’ve strayed into a science fiction review site. Making Waves, the second part of Thorne Moore’s very scary Salvage trilogy, falls unequivocally into that genre, as did Inside Out, the first part. But if you’ve read the first one, I guarantee you’ll want to read this one. And wearing one of her other hats, Thorne Moore does write crime fiction, so it’s not as if there’s no connection.

Making Waves is set a few years on from Inside Out. The six people delivered to Triton, one of Neptune’s moons and the power base of ruthless corporation Ragnox, are reaching the end of their seven-year contracts alive if not entirely unscathed and are about to return to the less dangerous and very different world a couple of centuries into our own future. They abandoned their lives to work on Triton in order to earn more money than most people can dream of. One of the six is left behind: Smith, who battered, sabotaged and even murdered his way to the high echelons of Triton’s hierarchy, has made himself too indispensable. But he has invaluable information which will enable Ragnox’s opponents to bring down the brutal and lawless regime to which they subject their employees.

As battle commences, we meet old friends again, and make new ones. Thorne Moore’s sure hand with characters comes into its own, and this time we know whose side we’re on from the outset. We revisit the Heloise, the space freighter which formed the location of the first volume, and the enclosed world she created there also expands to include Triton itself in all its appalling glory, and other outposts in a solar system ruled by corporations as determined and almost as grim as Ragnox. We even pay an occasional visit to Earth, now ravaged by war and global warming. We meet the Arkadians, descendants of the early explorers of the solar system loathed and crushed by Ragnox because of their unusual characteristics. Their opposition to Ragnox is relentless, and it’s as well to stay on the right side of them.

Thorne Moore’s projected future may be an alien one, but the world we’re living in here now renders it all too possible. The crime which permeates the entire scenario is the greatest and most widespread crime of all: man’s inhumanity to man. Like the first in the trilogy, Making Waves is compulsive reading. It fulfils the three criteria which for me add up to a gripping novel: it made me laugh, it made me cry and most of all it made me think. It also made me scared. Very scared indeed. And as it was doing all these things, I couldn’t put it down.
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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Thorne Moore grew up in Luton, near London, but has lived in Pembrokeshire in West Wales for the last 35 years. She writes psychological crime, or domestic noir, with an historical twist, focusing on the cause and consequences of crimes rather than on the details of the crimes themselves. A Time For Silence, set in Pembrokeshire, was published by Honno in 2012. It was followed by Motherlove and The Unravelling, set partly in a fictional version of Luton. Shadows, published by Endeavour in 2017, is set in an old house in Pembrokeshire, and is paired with Long Shadows, which explained the history and mysteries of the same house from Medieval times to the late Victorian period.

 https://www.thornemoore.co.uk/

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives in Oxfordshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.