Murder on Cabot's Landing Colonization Science Fiction, LGBTQ Science Fiction, gay Romance
DSP Publications
Sept 26,2023
Kindle
282
Amazon
Elam Vandreren arrives on Cabot’s Landing expecting to become the planet’s Resident and caretaker. Instead he finds himself investigating a grisly crime and uncovering even more disturbing secrets.
When Elam finds the prior Resident murdered, he thinks the Resident’s spouse did it. Sigurd van Dorstadt, the investigator from the transport ship Zuiderkruis, thinks Elam did it. They both think no one else is on the planet.
It turns out they’re both wrong—about everything.
Although Elam and Sigurd don’t like each other, they join forces with a team from Zuiderkruis to find the truth. The evidence soon points to unknown criminals hiding out in the ruins of an ancient military base—and they’re not the planet’s only other inhabitants.
When part of their team is taken hostage, Elam and Sigurd barely escape with their lives. To survive and rescue their friends, they must rely on each other and make an alliance with a secretive group called the Left Behind. But the more of Cabot’s Landing’s secrets they uncover and the more their feelings for each other grow, the more fraught their decisions become. With duty and honor at odds with their hearts, can Elam and Sigurd strike a balance they can live with?
Review by Gordon Phillips
Member of the Paranormal Romance Guild Review Team
Murder on Cabot’s Landing, a romance and adventure story, is in certain ways quite magical. It is true that there is much wrong in it, but also so much that is—to repeat the word—magical. For a fan of sci-fi, world-building, and maps, this novel represents a kind of treasure trove; a treasure trove with considerable tarnished pieces it is true, but also with much that glitters and gleams with the delight of real gems and gold.
Given that Griffin’s world creation is so detailed, the reader naturally expects it to be as meticulous, and for the most part it is. But there are exceptions—in particular a conflation of the east and west power stations (the former has cats, the latter doesn’t). But none of these things are beyond what a good beta reader would catch (and yes, that is an offer).
There are curiosities as well. For example, the southern Reserve Islands are virtually identical to Prince Edward Island, a province in Canada’s Atlantic region, the only differences being the snipping off of an isthmus to create two islands, and a scaling in size by roughly a factor of two. And then, of course, there is the use of Cabot for the world and various things in it. John Cabot was the first explorer of the New World from England (1497), and he explored—you guessed it—the coast of what is now Atlantic Canada. Presumably, since no provenance is given in the story, all of this is just a part of the delight the author had in world-building. (As Lewis Carroll, when asked why the characters in his epic poem “The Hunting of the Snark” all had names beginning with B (baker, banker, barrister, etc.), rightly replied: “Why not?”)
The story involves two main characters, Elam and Sigurd, who spark off each other, each irritated yet somehow fascinated by the other (presenting an example of what is perhaps the central puzzle and caveat of many romance stories: why two people who so obviously don’t get along should become mutually attracted). The increasing contact they have with each other heightens both negative and positive feelings, and bring into increasing focus the fact that they both have Secrets (the capitalization is a necessity here). In fact, these Secrets are so often referred to—as the narration jumps back and forth between them, chapter to chapter—that it becomes a bit irritating; there is, after all, such a thing as over worn mystery.
Elam, for example, has volunteered to become Resident—sole occupant of Cabot’s Landing—to escape from his past; and Sigurd, for no apparent reason, is aboard the merchant ship that makes the trip to exchange Residents. Both are what might be called overqualified for their respective positions, just how overqualified gradually emerging as the adventure progresses. For the Resident who is to leave, and his wife, have both been murdered—on a planet where they were the sole inhabitants. But things are not, it turns out, what they appear—and this continues throughout the novel, in a way that is on balance quite enjoyable. Clearly, Griffin enjoys plotting complexities and twists as much as he does world building.
Adventures, necessarily involving dangerous situations, provide great opportunities for bonding through moments of shared adversity, and Griffin does present some of these. Yet there are further depths of romance, moments of connection and getting to know each other, that are not pursued, despite their virtually sitting up and begging for further exploration; and this is especially true of the ending.
There is a quality to this story, with all of its elements, including many different linguistic references (Friesian, Esperanto, Malay), that is like a newly made stew: the separate ingredients have not melded together sufficiently to create a coherent, rich flavor.” Yet, there is much here to delight the reader, and aspects suggestive of other created fictional worlds from Frank Herbert’s Dune to Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Griffin presents a great deal of interesting and creative detail in a corking adventure story, and if the romance has flaws, it is at least passable.