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A review by colossal
An Oath of Dogs by Wendy N. Wagner
3.0
An interesting setup with a murder investigation on a forest moon colony with some really interesting world-building, but an ultimately unsatisfying story that leaves too much important stuff unexplained.
Kate Standish is a communications engineer who is recovering from a horrible accident which has left her with traumatic agoraphobia and the need for a service dog. Standish and Hattie (her service dog) have come to the moon colony of Huginn in the Yggdrasil system to work in an outlying forestry community only to find that the man she has come to work for is dead and she has his job. As Standish settles into the community it becomes clear that everything is not right. The death of Duncan Chambers (Standish's predecessor) is the focus of a cover-up, there's a pack of wild dogs that's terrorizing the community and there appears to be something deeply strange with the descendants of the first settlers of the moon, a religious community called the Word Made Flesh. Meanwhile Duncan's ex-lover Peter Bajowski, a biologist working for the company that runs the primary industry on Huginn, is discovering some very strange things about the local biology.
There's a lot going on here. Company town politics and a murder mystery along with a really different ecosystem and an overarching weirdness that may have a rational explanation, but feels more like magical realism (thanks to Justine's Review for pointing this out). I'm actually reminded strongly of a classic SF novel here, but just the reference is something of a spoiler for what's happening:.
While I though the writing was solid and the plotting pretty good, at least in the first half of the book, I really didn't buy the magic realism element (). For a book that goes to some pains to get its technical elements correct, I found the swerve to the "just-so" element a step too far. I also thought that some of the more unlikely biological discoveries () required more explanation and/or background. And a minor nitpick that I felt was important: how could shipping timber interstellar distances possibly be economical?
I think that this author is worth watching, but I felt let down by the world-building and follow-through of this particular book.
Kate Standish is a communications engineer who is recovering from a horrible accident which has left her with traumatic agoraphobia and the need for a service dog. Standish and Hattie (her service dog) have come to the moon colony of Huginn in the Yggdrasil system to work in an outlying forestry community only to find that the man she has come to work for is dead and she has his job. As Standish settles into the community it becomes clear that everything is not right. The death of Duncan Chambers (Standish's predecessor) is the focus of a cover-up, there's a pack of wild dogs that's terrorizing the community and there appears to be something deeply strange with the descendants of the first settlers of the moon, a religious community called the Word Made Flesh. Meanwhile Duncan's ex-lover Peter Bajowski, a biologist working for the company that runs the primary industry on Huginn, is discovering some very strange things about the local biology.
There's a lot going on here. Company town politics and a murder mystery along with a really different ecosystem and an overarching weirdness that may have a rational explanation, but feels more like magical realism (thanks to Justine's Review for pointing this out). I'm actually reminded strongly of a classic SF novel here, but just the reference is something of a spoiler for what's happening:
Spoiler
[b:Solaris|95558|Solaris|Stanisław Lem|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1498631519s/95558.jpg|3333881] with the moon seeming to have an overarching intelligenceWhile I though the writing was solid and the plotting pretty good, at least in the first half of the book, I really didn't buy the magic realism element (
Spoiler
transubstantiationSpoiler
a new terrestrial/extra-terrestrial symbiosisI think that this author is worth watching, but I felt let down by the world-building and follow-through of this particular book.