Meet Andorra Pett; with her trusty sidekick, she’s taken over a derelict café. On a mining station. It just happens to be orbiting Saturn!She’s hoping for a fresh start, away from all the drama of her old life. It’s a chance to relax and start again in a place where nobody knows anything about her or her past.But the café holds a secret, and secrets have a habit of coming out; whether you want … whether you want them to or not. And being accident prone doesn’t help. The more you try to pretend that you know what’s going on, the worse it gets.
Andorra’s plans for peace and quiet get lost amid the revelations and skulduggery and she soon realises that the fate of the whole station lies in her hapless hands.
In space, you can still trip over your feet; the question is, will you land upright?
more
This is about as different as it gets in terms of sci/fi murder mystery sleuthing. For a start it is set on Saturn in a café frequented by miners, with lots of gossip and dodgy goings on and a body hidden in a freezer. It is imaginative and I like imaginative!The author himself has described it as an ‘Agatha Raisin in space.’
Who killed the previous owner of the ‘Ucky Strike Cafe’ which has lost its L?
It seems that Andorra might be the one to find out. There is a light-hearted feel to this novel and plenty of moments that made me laugh right from the start:
Also there are some interesting, (exclamation, exclamation,) revelations LOL… that I didn’t see coming at all and who would have guessed the culprit? Not me…
Andorra comes across as a likeable character who is looking for love and (sometimes tries too hard to find it .) Can she find love now she has escaped the hurts of her past? The supporting characters are believable and the story is well-written and engaging.
Even though it is Sc-fi it is a cozy Sci-fi, so don’t let that put you off if that might.
Do check out Richard’s website. He has written an enviable collection of books and is a fantastic supporter of independent authors with his Indie Showcases.
My recommendation: Read it! 5 stars. Enjoyable read.
This review is for the audio book.
This is the first book by this author that I have listened too or read but it won’t be the last. I loved it. The whole idea of setting the mystery in space is such an unusual idea, it makes it stand out from all the rest of the cosy mysteries out there. You got a good sense of being in space without it being the main focus or taking away from the mystery side of the story. Combine that with a great cast of characters and the author is onto a winner here. The mystery was good with plenty of suspects but it was the characters that really made it work. I especially liked the main characters Andi and Cy, and like Andi I was hoping some of the other characters were innocent as they each became suspects. I hope there are a lot more books in the series to come.
When Andi catches her boyfriend cheating on her, she and her best friend run away from there dead end jobs and boring lives, to the furthest place they could go, Saturn. Once there they decide to take over the running of one of the two cafe at the station. The problem is the cafe has a lot of history and bad memories for the people at the station, mainly because of the previous owner. He just disappeared one night and everybody believes he ran off to escape a jealous husband. So they were not expecting to find him dead in the freezer. Perhaps one of the jealous husbands caught up with him. Rather than become the prime suspects and being new to the station with nobody to trust, Andi and Cy decide to keep his death quiet and investigate themselves. Can they find the killer? And what about the tell all book he was planning to write? Everybody seems to want a job at the cafe but do they need jobs or are they just looking for the book? And who can they trust? The cafe is broken into during the night and a fight breaks out, at this rate Andi is going to be on first name turns with all the officer’s. She had better find the killer before the police find a reason to search the freezer and find the body.
The narrator was good and she used different voices for each of the characters.
I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.
This is a fun little mystery set out in the rings of Saturn. Andi Pett and her friend Cy have left Earth for the outer reaches of the solar system because a love affair went bad for Andi. Even though they have absolutely no experience in running a restaurant, they decide to open a café and go into competition with the man who unofficially runs the station. Almost immediately, they discover that the former owner of their new establishment didn’t simply pick up and leave as everyone believes. His very dead body is found frozen in the freezer. Andi and Cy are convinced by their new friends not to report the crime on the theory that they will be blamed even though they just arrived on the station that day and the dead man has been missing a long time. Then things get really crazy!
There are moments in this story, such as the one that I just described, when as a reader you have to do more than suspend a little disbelief. For example, everyone thinks the dead man left the station, but apparently no one thought to check the shuttle records to see if that was true. And no one searched his place (and the freezer he was lying in) even though, as it turns out, the dead man had kept a black book with explicit details of his many liaisons that everyone thinks he was blackmailing people with. For some reason, the many days or weeks the restaurant was empty before Andi arrived were not good times to search it—although everyone wants to once the café opens. Yet, strangely, these weaknesses in the plot do not in any way detract from the overall enjoyment of the story. This is a people-centric tale in which you follow Andi trying to figure out who the murderer is by learning about all the people he interacted with. There are a lot of great characters in this book and the clues are honest and decipherable. If you like a cozy mystery, you’ll be glad you read Andorra Pett and the Oort Cloud Café.
Andorra and her best friend Cy are fabulous as the lead characters in this entertaining science fiction mystery story that takes place on a space station operating on the rings of Saturn.
Dee writes with a natural and relaxed style, infused with humour and observant insight into human behaviour and responses.
The story itself is well-crafted, immersing the reader in the station’s community and keeping them guessing with well-executed twists and clever diversions woven seamlessly into the plot.
The world building is original and complex, opening the reader’s imagination to the vast possibilities of life beyond our own world.
The cast of characters and their individual personalities, quirks and motivations remind the reader that people are the same wherever you go, which is why the premise and assumptions of the story work so well.
This is a most enjoyable read that will appeal to lovers of sci-fi and murder mysteries alike.