Looking For a Good Book

Russ Wesley has taken a new job with Intergalactic Waste Management, LLC. It looks like it will be a totally mindless, cushy job clearing space debris while riding around in a state-of-the-art salvage processing ship. And if that wasn’t sweet enough, he’s working with Nina Hosseinzadeh again – a friend whose company he enjoys and someone he can trust to have his back as he has hers.

But when a job is too good to be true, it probably has a dark side that simply has been revealed yet.

That dark side appears when Russ discovers the dead body of a friend, hidden among some space wreckage. He’s determined to do right by the memory of his friend and vows to learn how she died and get get some closure for her.

Waste management comes in contact with some scummy individuals and Russ and Nina’s investigation brings them in contact with some of the slimiest criminals in the quadrant as well as some of the upper-crust elite. After all, everyone has garbage.

I picked up this book because it looked fun. A great cover and a clever premise promised in the title – those involved in waste management are often overlooked but they tend to see everything, especially the things we don’t want others to see. And I was in the mood for a fun, space opera adventure.

Unfortunately this didn’t quite satisfy as much as I’d hoped.

First off, this is a follow-up to Intergalactic Exterminators, Inc (another clever premise) which I had not read. I suspect a good deal of character development was explored in the first book.

There’s a valiant attempt to bring a lot of action to the story and it starts right at the beginning with the first chapter and Russ plunging to his death. I love thrusting the reader into immediate action and then letting the reader catch up as the story moves, but the problem I had was that he action never felt thrilling. This is primarily because the action is being told to us – we’re being presented an action story rather than brought in and involved in it. Take for instance this paragraph (again, right at the beginning of the first chapter):

Russ looked down as the ground rushed up. The deep, endless ocean wasn’t blue. It was clear, like water flowing out of a kitchen sink—albeit choppy, violent, and rising toward them very quickly. Disposable EFlyers tended to crack open when they landed on sand. He wondered what they did when they landed in liquid. “S-s-stabilizers seem like something important to have,” Russ said.

If the ground is rushing up (or, more precisely, if Russ is rushing down), do we need an explanation of what ‘clear water’ means? Do we also need to know that the flyers tend to crack when they land on sand before he wonders what happens when the land in water? This paragraph about ‘rushing’ could have moved a lot quicker.

And essentially that’s the problem I had throughout. Clever and potentially fun, the book took too long to get anywhere.

Looking for a good book? A space opera adventure should never drag, but Intergalactic Waste Management, LLC by Ash Bishop moved like a waste management truck – slow and steady, stopping regularly and never picking up steam. Characters and concept are clever but needed to not be held back.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Edelweiss, in exchange for an honest review.

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Intergalactic Waste Management, LLC

author: Ash Bishop

publisher: CamCat Books

ISBN: 9780744312157

hardcover, 400 pages