THE LUMINOUS DEAD by Caitlin Starling
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Although this book is considered a sci-fi horror, it was not exactly a horror in the way that I expected. The story is set on a faraway mining planet, and caver Gyre is anxious to take a new mission to earn money to find her mother who left when she was young. As she gets further into the mission, she learns that it is far from the usual mapping of mineral deposits that she expected. Her guide, Em, is not much older than herself, and has her skipping past all the usual significant discoveries for something beyond. 

I found this story to be good and it mostly kept my interest throughout, but I would have liked the fear of the Tunneler, a deadly creature that we don't meet until the end of the book, to be enhanced toward the beginning. As a reader, I knew it was nearby, but didn't understand the fear until the actual encounter. I also would have like to have seen the relationship between Gyre and Em develop a little deeper. I didn't understand Gyre's sudden feelings for Em. They seemed out of the blue. The first half of the story spent a lot of time on the specifics of cave diving. If this is your special interest, you will LOVE this book! To me, the horror came from Gyre being alone in the caves for so long and encountering dead bodies of previous divers along the way, that it drove her to madness. Also, the dangers of cave diving on its own. The ending was satisfying.

​COMPOUND FRACTURE by Andrew Joseph White

I can usually tell when an author who writes about a small town has never lived in a small town. I can also tell when an author has, and Andrew Joseph White obviously knows first-hand the nuances of living in a town very far removed from a big city. They're the same towns people avoid driving through and have horror stories written about. Compound Fracture isn't exactly a horror story, but a coming-of-age story about Miles who is just coming out as trans while also discovering he is autistic. It is also the story of friendship, hardship, class division, and revenge. This is not a sweet tale, but very gruesome and hard to read at times, but it is Miles' story that happened the summer before his senior year of high school.

The story is well-written, intense, emotional, shocking, realistic, and captivating to the very end. I never know what to expect from books by Andrew Joseph White, but I know it will be quite the ride. I already have his next book on my bookshelf.

PROJECT HAIL MARY by Andy Weir

I enjoyed Project Hail Mary even more than The Martian. Instead of one man trying to survive on a foreign planet, this story is about one man trying to figure out how to save Earth from a micro-organism from another galaxy. He is light-years away to solve the problem when he meets Rocky, an alien that looks like a five-legged giant spider made of rocks. The two of them are in the Tau Ceti system for the same reason, and work together to save both their planets. But they must learn each others language and culture to do so. When they do find a solution, it causes even more problems.

This is a wonderful story that combines multiple scientific fields, including social sciences to explain what is happening and why the characters do what they do, but it never feels like too much. There is a lot of suspense in the story, right up into the last chapter that kept the pages turning. I also found the scenes that go back in time, and shown as Ryland Grace retrieving a past memory, easy to follow and relevant to what was happening in the current time.

I really enjoyed Project Hail Mary and I look forward to watching the movie version soon!

PENDERGAST: THE BEGINNING by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child 

I've read several of the Pendergast novels by Preston & Child, so when I learned that an origin story was releasing, I wanted to read it. Especially after rereading Relic last year. In this novel, Pendergast joins the New Orleans Field Office as a probationary FBI agent under Special Agent Chambers. When the two of them are suspended for not doing an investigation by the rules, Pendergast looks deeper into similar cases that could be related. But where Chambers wants to find a simple explanation, Pendergast believes nothing is that simple and once again goes against the rules to entertain his hunch. In the end, the case is not so simple and even more gruesome than Pendergast believed.

I really enjoyed this insight into Pendergast's beginnings as an FBI agent. It reveals how his mind works—very different from the average mind iykyk—while also giving us other details of his life, some of which have been revealed in other books in the series. And the epilogue is from Relic, so it's a smooth transition for those who haven't read it.

I do wonder if there will be a book written from an even earlier time in Pendergast's life, specifically his and Proctor's time with Ghost Company.