Review: The Apollo Murders by Chris Hadfield

Blurb:

From New York Times bestselling author and astronaut Chris Hadfield comes this exceptional thriller and "exciting journey" into the dark heart of the Cold War and the space race (Andy Weir, author of The Martian and Project Hail Mary)—soon to be a major TV series from Altitude and Sylvester Stallone’s Balboa Productions.

1973: a final, top-secret mission to the Moon. Three astronauts in a tiny spaceship, a quarter million miles from home. A quarter million miles from help.

NASA is about to launch Apollo 18. While the mission has been billed as a scientific one, flight controller Kazimieras "Kaz" Zemeckis knows there is a darker objective. Intelligence has discovered a secret Soviet space station spying on America, and Apollo 18 may be the only chance to stop it.

But even as Kaz races to keep the NASA crew one step ahead of their Russian rivals, a deadly accident reveals that not everyone involved is quite who they were thought to be. With political stakes stretched to the breaking point, the White House and the Kremlin can only watch as their astronauts collide on the lunar surface, far beyond the reach of law or rescue.
 
Full of the fascinating technical detail that fans of The Martian loved, and reminiscent of the thrilling claustrophobia, twists, and tension of The Hunt for Red October, The Apollo Murders is a high-stakes thriller unlike any other. Chris Hadfield captures the fierce G-forces of launch, the frozen loneliness of space, and the fear of holding on to the outside of a spacecraft orbiting the Earth at 17,000 miles per hour as only someone who has experienced all of these things in real life can.
 
Strap in and count down for the ride of a lifetime.

Review:

The Apollo Murders has been on my radar for several years, but lingered on my TBR far longer than it should have. In fact, the copy I read was the second I’d purchased. The first was one I bought as a birthday present for my mom a couple of years ago. She was the one who first got me hooked on reading, and so now I try to return the favor by buying her books I think she’d enjoy - and The Apollo Murders seemed like a perfect candidate for a few reasons:

My mom and I share very similar tastes when it comes to this specific type of historical fiction. As you can read in my bio at the bottom of this page, my grandfather (my mom’s dad) was an engineer at North American Aviation in the 60s, and he helped to design many of the components of the second stage of the Saturn V rocket; so my mom and I both have always been keenly fascinated by the history of the Space Race, since we had family who were personally involved in it. As part of this fascination, one of the first “grown-up” books my mom shared with me was Jim Lovell’s and Jeffrey Kluger’s Lost Moon (the dramatized autobiography of Lovell’s experiences aboard Apollo 13) and it wasn’t too long after that we all sat down as a family to watch Ron Howard’s 1995 filmic adaptation (simply titled Apollo 13 - still to my mind the best real-life space movie ever made); and at that point I was hooked on space. Add to that a family move from California to Florida, where we could visit Kennedy Space Center and watch Space Shuttle launches from our backyard; and there was no way to keep the pull of the stars out of my soul. 

And so when I saw - sitting the shelf at one of our local bookstores here in Chicagoland - a black hardcover emblazoned with three blocky, red words - The Apollo Murders - and I saw just below them “Chris Hadfield”, I knew I’d found a gem. I’d known of Commander Chris Hadfield years prior to that moment, ever since I’d seen his cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”, which - if you haven’t seen it - was creatively shot aboard the International Space Station during one of Hadfield’s tours in low-Earth-orbit. So to know then that there was a real, contemporary astronaut writing historical fiction about the Space Race, it seemed like the perfect book to share with my mom. 

Fast forward then to now, when I actually read the book. And, folks, let me tell you, this thing is a barnburner of a novel. 

The story begins - properly - in 1973, and follows a fictionalized version of the 18th Apollo mission. But this Apollo mission, unlike its predecessors, will have explicitly militaristic objectives. The three astronauts flying aboard Apollo 18 will need to perform some recon on (and potentially hunt down) a new Soviet spy station in Earth’s orbit and a new remote-controlled Soviet rover on the Moon. It’s all being kept very hush-hush, and as such is rife for potential political intrigue. The import of exactly why Apollo 18 needs to disable this new Soviet station is all played very close to the vest by those characters who are in the know, keeping even us - the readers - ignorant through the final pages. All we know is that secret testing is being done at Area 51 (when isn’t it?), and the US doesn’t want the Soviets to be able to photograph whatever it is that’s being tested there. So the station must go.

And frankly, that’s all I feel comfortable telling you in this review. Hadfield quickly unravels whatever narrative expectations you might have going into the story, meticulously weaving a tangled web of secrets connecting NASA, the United State’s myriad security departments, the Soviet Space Program, the KGB, and the astronauts of both space programs. Hadfield showcases his impressive literary skill as he slowly untangles this web, slowly introducing new plot elements that - though they might seem unimportant when we first learn of them - slowly compound upon one another, building up dangerous pressure within the narrative and between the characters, until the explosive final pages unleash the full force of Hadfield’s surgically assembled space-age thriller. 

Friends… this book is good. 

And beyond the tactically precise nature of the narrative itself, the moment-to-moment writing of The Apollo Murders is profoundly captivating. As writers, we’re always told to “write what you know”, and since The Apollo Murders was written by an actual astronaut, there is such distinct verisimilitude to every moment of the text. You know you’re reading fiction - you know none of this really happened - but because of the attention to detail and the inclusion of just the right amount of real Space Race history (the final final pages of the book are an Author’s Note in which Hadfield breaks down exactly what was real and what wasn’t) The Apollo Murders feels stunningly real. 

But if you come to this text as novice in space exploration history, do not fear, Hadfield is overwhelmingly thorough about providing proper context for the myriad acronyms used by the characters, and about explaining every important piece of hardware or software you’ll need to understand (this is especially important in the book like this where something as minor as a loose bit of solder in a comms system is capable of exponentially ratcheting up the stakes - fans of Andy Weir’s The Martian will know the exact feeling of reading some offhand passage about a random character assembling a bit of machinery, and the knot that forms in your gut when you realize why you’re being told this information).

So we’ve got a stunning narrative with excellent structure and pin-point accurate set-ups and pay-offs… what else is there to convince you to read this book? Well add to all of that the knowledge that The Apollo Murders is criminally readable. Hadfield keeps chapters short and sweet, such that the ending of one chapter can’t help but tempt you to read just one more - and then suddenly you’ve read ten. And there’s really something truly remarkable about narratives in this setting, where the truly skilled storytellers in the field are able to wring such tension from scenes that are ostensibly just a bunch of dudes looking at data on screens (for other examples of this incredible feat see: Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 and John McTiernan’s adaptation of Tom Clancy’s The Hunt For Red October), but Hadfield does it! You will not want to put it down!

Between writing these paragraphs I ordered a copy of Hadfield’s sequel to The Apollo Murders - The Defector - and I can’t wait to see where this goes. If you’re a fan of Space Race drama like that found in Apollo 13, The Right Stuff, First Man, The Martian, Capricorn One, or For All Mankind (I might even shout out Ben Bova’s Venus as a comparable text about struggling to survive in space); or espionage thrillers like The Hunt for Red October, Argo, or U-571 - I’d urge you to check out The Apollo Murders. You won’t regret it.