‘By The Book’ by Thorne Moore

Published by Pear Tree Publications,
1 November 2023.
ISBN: 979-886444546-4 (PB)

One hopes that the third part of a trilogy ends with some kind of resolution, especially when the first two parts left the bad guys still out there, maybe bruised but undefeated. And especially when the scenario the author has presented is as scary and, let’s face it, as possible as in Thorne Moore’s Salvage. All three books are set in an all-too-feasible future, which makes them unequivocally science fiction; but crime is all-encompassing, and we can be sure there’ll be plenty of it around in a few hundred years. This time there’s abduction, fraud, genocide – and that’s just for starters. It’s hard to summarize the plot without spoilers, so look away now if you plan to read the series from the start.

Old friends from the spaceship Heloise have escaped from Triton and brought down the lawless industrial empire based there, but their arch-enemy and bad-guy-in-chief Jordan Pascal is still at large – or is he? The orchestrator of the Triton coup, Commandant Smith, was presumed killed in the resulting mayhem, but again, that’s in doubt. Pascal and his heirs are still hell-bent on universe domination, and the Arkadians, descendants of the early space explorers, want to claim back their birthright. Commandant DeWitter, who has assumed control of Pascal’s Ragnox empire, somehow has to be brought down, especially when an entire world – well, asteroid – is destroyed along with its inhabitants, and there are hints that another is similarly doomed.

Once again, Thorne Moore has created characters who live, breathe and play an essential role in the battle between good and evil. Some we met in the earlier volumes: Yasmin, who now heads up a communications agency which tries to tell it how it is; Abigail, once a throwback to the 1930s debutante era, now a highly  resourceful and skilled engineer; Merrit, scientist and doctor. There are new people too: anxious Ranleigh, in charge of Eldorado, a key asteroid facility in the Ragnox armoury; Miss Phelan, his highly efficient but surprising secretary, and Claudette, his capable and even more surprising wife; and best of all, Leila, thirteen years old going on thirty-five and even more resourceful than Abigail. And then there’s Jo-Jo, Scarlet Pimpernel of his time.

Like the previous two in the trilogy, By the Book held me gripped from the first page; at times I could hardly bear to go on reading, but it proved compulsive. Ultimately it left me feeling slightly less despairing, slightly less scared than the other two; while good people are still out there, surely greed and the lust for power will not prevail. And while there are books as thought-provoking and enthralling to read, surely the world will never be as bad a place as Thorne Moore’s cautionary saga.
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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.