Today, I bring you another blog tour set many light-years away, perfect to escape from our solar system. I’m talking about Lost Solace by Karl Drinkwater. My many thanks to Anne Cater and the author for allowing me to be a part of this tour.

Author: Karl Drinkwater Pages: 273 Genre: Sci-Fi Publication: 15th October 2017

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Synopsis:

Sometimes spaceships disappear with everyone on board – the Lost Ships. But sometimes they come back, strangely altered, derelict, and rumoured to be full of horrors.

Opal is on a mission. She’s been seeking something her whole life. Something she is willing to die for. And she thinks it might be on a Lost Ship.

Opal has stolen Clarissa, an experimental AI-controlled spaceship, from the military. Together they have tracked down a Lost Ship, in a lonely nebula far from colonised space.

The Lost Ship is falling into the gravity well of a neutron star, and will soon be truly lost… forever. Legends say the ships harbour death, but there’s no time for indecision.

Opal gears up to board it. She’s just one woman, entering an alien and lethal environment. But perhaps with the aid of Clarissa’s intelligence – and an armoured spacesuit – Opal may stand a chance.

Review:

Opal is the type of female heroine that was missing in my life. She doesn’t flinch, she doesn’t cower, she’s a force of nature. Once she has an objective is not much you can do to stop her. She was fierce throughout the entire book, even when the end was inevitable, she managed to refocus and be ready for battle. Certainly, Clarissa still plays a big part in Opal’s strength. Their relationship is no longer human and machine, but instead friends. And me after watching multiple movies with AIs, I know that you can never trust one. From the first page, I never believed that Clarissa was, in fact, a friend to Opal, and I was waiting for the moment when she would double-cross her. But I guess I have to read the second book, Chasing Solace, to find out if that’s true or not.

It was strange when I realised this was going to be a story with only two characters. That’s something I never read before. And even though there were times when Opal interacted with other people, it’s clear that the story is an only two-person adventure. There where times, I was craving another type of interaction other than their friendship, a romantic interested or a villain, anything that would break off that same interaction between both characters. It didn’t take long for that to happen with Clarissa’s multiple personas.

At some point, Clarissa changes her voice when she switches the version of herself (not by choice), and that to me was proof of how a great writer Kral is. The way Clarissa talks, it’s so distinguishable between the different stages, it’s mesmerizing. Not only the author managed to create two well-developed characters and also give new voices to one of them without breaking the character.

Speaking of writing, I have to say it was quite easy to sometimes get lost in those technological and astronomical descriptions since I’m not used to them, and it forced me to slow down the rhythm of my reading. But at the same time, Karl can keep me hooked with my muscles tense as I go from page to page anxious to know what’s going to happen next. The story does develop slower than I would prefer, but I got so caught up between everything that it seems the story happens really fast. In one moment Opal is talking with Clarissa, the next one she’s hijacking the lost ship, and on the next one, she’s fighting for her life.

Between Opal being a quick ass woman and Clarissa’s attempts of being humorous, they are a duo that I want to read more about.

About the author

Karl Drinkwater is originally from Manchester but lived in Wales for twenty years, and now calls Scotland his home. He’s a full-time author, edits fiction for other writers, and was a professional librarian for over twenty-five years. He has degrees in English, Classics, and Information Science.

He writes in multiple genres: his aim is always just to tell a good story. Among his books you’ll find elements of literary and contemporary fiction, gritty urban, horror, suspense, paranormal, thriller, sci-fi, romance, social commentary, and more. The end result is interesting and authentic characters, clever and compelling plots, and believable worlds.

When he isn’t writing he loves exercise, guitars, computer and board games, the natural environment, animals, social justice, cake, and zombies. Not necessarily in that order.

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Even though, this is the final stop on the blog tour, check out the other bloggers that also made part of this tour.