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Alien Quest (Alien Danger Book 1), Mark Zubro
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I picked this up for free just before Christmas. Moving it up now in the queue of books to read...
3.5 Stars for me but not quite enough to round up to 4. I thought Alien Home was better than Alien Quest but if there is not a book three to wrap up the story I'm going to be ticked. I don't handle cliffhangers well and when I saw my Kindle only had 15 minutes left in the book I knew I was in trouble.
Uh oh. Well, I hate cliff-hangers, too. A cheat.
By Mark Zubro
Four stars
Mike Carlson learns a few important lessons in this book. You can save some people, but you can’t save everyone. And you never know when love will strike.
Oh, yes, and Mike also learns that there are aliens.
Zubro’s gently comic alien adventure series begins with this book, in which a twenty-something waiter in Chicago finds himself caught up in an intergalactic manhunt. Full of wry humor, the book takes its characters seriously but not itself—and that’s a good thing. There are no portentous commentaries about the cosmos, and Mike’s resident alien is sort of like a hot gay Joe Friday—just the facts, ma’am. Well, some of the facts, anyway.
“What haven’t you told me?”
“Probably several million things. Where would you like me to start?”
What makes this book memorable is the subplots that weave themselves around the central storyline: Mike’s lifelong friend and first boyfriend, Darryl; and his obnoxious fourteen-year-old nephew Jack. Although these two narratives are not connected to the alien tale any more than they are to each other, they are both profoundly tied to Mike, who he knows, and who he is. It is Mike’s response to the three protagonists of these storylines—Darryl, Jack and Joe, the alien—that ties the reader to the book.
There is no world-building here, it is sci-fi only in the presence of the aliens and their otherworldly technology. Everything else is Chicago and its environs (but for one side-trip that’s a romantic gesture and probably a teaser for another book). But that’s OK, because Mike and Joe together make an interesting study in human nature that keep you turning the pages.
I really want to see Mike Carlson again, which is why I bought book 2, Alien Home.