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Kat & Jerry Mystery Adventures #3
Adventure in Asteroid City
Science fiction for mystery buffs who enjoy action mixed in with their detective work.
Hidden in a mining settlement on an asteroid ring -- a priceless treasure.
Kat & Jerry -- along with their cat, "Batman" -- are facing their toughest challenge yet, as they scramble to beat the bad guys to a priceless artifact hidden in an asteroid mining settlement.
But solving the puzzle of where this treasure is hidden is only their first challenge. Even if they manage to stay alive long enough to figure out where the prize has been stashed, these two wisecracking sleuths will still need to find a way to liberate it.
And if that means breaking into an impenetrable vault with bulletproof security – well, that’s all in a day’s work for this resourceful duo.
So strap yourself in and get ready to thrill to another exciting mystery adventure with Kat, Jerry -- and Batman, of course.
Kat & Jerry -- along with their cat, "Batman" -- are facing their toughest challenge yet, as they scramble to beat the bad guys to a priceless artifact hidden in an asteroid mining settlement.
But solving the puzzle of where this treasure is hidden is only their first challenge. Even if they manage to stay alive long enough to figure out where the prize has been stashed, these two wisecracking sleuths will still need to find a way to liberate it.
And if that means breaking into an impenetrable vault with bulletproof security – well, that’s all in a day’s work for this resourceful duo.
So strap yourself in and get ready to thrill to another exciting mystery adventure with Kat, Jerry -- and Batman, of course.
274 pages, Hardcover
Published April 15, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 28, 2025
Unfortunately, I don't like Kat and Jerry. They're extremely quick to adopt ultraviolent solutions to their problems, which the author describes with lots of gory details, or to damage a valuable artwork just to provide a distraction, while never suffering any real consequences. Presumably in an attempt to make them less antiheroic, the author
I think their "banter" is supposed to be both funny and endearing, but I didn't find it either one of those things; I thought it was weak. Their personalities are thin, too, and what there is of them didn't appeal to me. Jerry was born in the 20th century, and is still alive at the age of 250, for reasons that are not fully explained in this book (there are earlier, shorter stories that presumably explain it). Some sort of revival tech that he could afford because he was rich, apparently. This mainly means that he can make pop culture references that we, the readers, recognize. Kat... is some kind of action woman with magic glasses.
The setting is mostly generic 1950s or 1960s-style space opera, complete with sexism that would be less jarring in that time than it is in our own, except, of course, for the computer bits. These are mostly handwaved with some meaningless technobabble, or the word "quantum" used to mean "basically magic, can do anything the plot needs it to." The mining colony explicitly doesn't have a government, and yet in most respects feels like a small town that has a government to put up the decorative street lights and planter boxes, run the Archives and other central amenities, make strict quarantine laws, and provide a police force that is, admittedly, deeply inadequate (drawn from the various mining companies' security staff, supposedly). All of this is happening in orbit around a planet which, at one and the same time, is all the way out at the edge of the galaxy and also one of the first habitable exoplanets to be discovered from Earth, which seems contradictory.
This future of 200 years away is less futuristic than parts of the present, too. There's a lot of physical cash (called, because this is generic mid-20th-century-style space opera, "credits") and paper documents. At one point, a vehicle is left "idling," which is something internal combustion vehicles do and electric vehicles don't. So has some idiot decided it's OK to have internal combustion in a closed atmosphere, or is it just an error by the author?
I hung on to the end only because I do love a heist, and I was promised a heist. It was fairly clever, as heists go, though it did rely on something going exactly right that didn't completely convince me that it would necessarily do that.
The author (or the editor, possibly) has a bad habit of hyphenating a verb and its associated preposition when they are not acting as a compound adjective modifying a noun. In fact, very few of the places a hyphen is used are places that should have a hyphen. Also, when a single sentence is split with a dialog tag, the sentence resumes after the tag with a capital letter, which is incorrect; it's still part of the same sentence, and should be punctuated as such. Since I read a pre-publication version from Netgalley, it is possible that these problems will be fixed before publication, along with some missing or added quotation marks and a few other minor glitches.
Overall, it fell short in execution, and didn't match my taste well either, but it kept me interested enough to finish despite that. For me, that's a three-star book.
I think their "banter" is supposed to be both funny and endearing, but I didn't find it either one of those things; I thought it was weak. Their personalities are thin, too, and what there is of them didn't appeal to me. Jerry was born in the 20th century, and is still alive at the age of 250, for reasons that are not fully explained in this book (there are earlier, shorter stories that presumably explain it). Some sort of revival tech that he could afford because he was rich, apparently. This mainly means that he can make pop culture references that we, the readers, recognize. Kat... is some kind of action woman with magic glasses.
The setting is mostly generic 1950s or 1960s-style space opera, complete with sexism that would be less jarring in that time than it is in our own, except, of course, for the computer bits. These are mostly handwaved with some meaningless technobabble, or the word "quantum" used to mean "basically magic, can do anything the plot needs it to." The mining colony explicitly doesn't have a government, and yet in most respects feels like a small town that has a government to put up the decorative street lights and planter boxes, run the Archives and other central amenities, make strict quarantine laws, and provide a police force that is, admittedly, deeply inadequate (drawn from the various mining companies' security staff, supposedly). All of this is happening in orbit around a planet which, at one and the same time, is all the way out at the edge of the galaxy and also one of the first habitable exoplanets to be discovered from Earth, which seems contradictory.
This future of 200 years away is less futuristic than parts of the present, too. There's a lot of physical cash (called, because this is generic mid-20th-century-style space opera, "credits") and paper documents. At one point, a vehicle is left "idling," which is something internal combustion vehicles do and electric vehicles don't. So has some idiot decided it's OK to have internal combustion in a closed atmosphere, or is it just an error by the author?
I hung on to the end only because I do love a heist, and I was promised a heist. It was fairly clever, as heists go, though it did rely on something going exactly right that didn't completely convince me that it would necessarily do that.
The author (or the editor, possibly) has a bad habit of hyphenating a verb and its associated preposition when they are not acting as a compound adjective modifying a noun. In fact, very few of the places a hyphen is used are places that should have a hyphen. Also, when a single sentence is split with a dialog tag, the sentence resumes after the tag with a capital letter, which is incorrect; it's still part of the same sentence, and should be punctuated as such. Since I read a pre-publication version from Netgalley, it is possible that these problems will be fixed before publication, along with some missing or added quotation marks and a few other minor glitches.
Overall, it fell short in execution, and didn't match my taste well either, but it kept me interested enough to finish despite that. For me, that's a three-star book.
June 12, 2025
I got this book on netgalley but after reading it I would happily pay for it. It is that good.
This book follows the adventures of two space explorers (Kat and Jerry) that have already appeared in two other books by this author.
These characters are hilarious. I loved all their interactions and their clever dialogue. They have great chemistry and are a perfect match.
The story in this book is very well constructed. It is about a heist, although it doesn't start out that way. It starts out as sort of a treasure hunt looking for a valuable object. (I won't say more so I don't give anything away.) There is lots of action and a lot of tension at times.
I give this book five out of five because the heist was genius and exciting. It was the perfect climax for the action that had been leading up to it.
I intend to read the other books in this series that feature these two characters. This is the kind of science fiction that I have been looking for and I enjoyed it a lot.
This book follows the adventures of two space explorers (Kat and Jerry) that have already appeared in two other books by this author.
These characters are hilarious. I loved all their interactions and their clever dialogue. They have great chemistry and are a perfect match.
The story in this book is very well constructed. It is about a heist, although it doesn't start out that way. It starts out as sort of a treasure hunt looking for a valuable object. (I won't say more so I don't give anything away.) There is lots of action and a lot of tension at times.
I give this book five out of five because the heist was genius and exciting. It was the perfect climax for the action that had been leading up to it.
I intend to read the other books in this series that feature these two characters. This is the kind of science fiction that I have been looking for and I enjoyed it a lot.
May 31, 2025
J M Holmes has a new case for Kat & Jerry, who travel around the inhabited part of the galaxy finding lost objects. (I haven’t read the previous books.) In a solar system with a barely liveable world, there are very valuable asteroids. Because the deed to the system has been mislaid, the Mining companies don’t have to pay fees to mine the asteroid belt, and they'll do anything to either find the deed, or stop anyone else from finding it. Thus the Adventure in Asteroid City(hard fromLiterati International) involves solving the mystery of who killed the person who first located the missing deed, but also breaking into a heavily secured vault, Kat and Jerry also have to survive constant deadly attacks, and treachery. Light fun.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews