Ahoy there me mateys!  This was the best one yet!  For me, the highlight of the author's writing is her eerie atmospheres.  In this story, Halley is hiding from political disaster fallout.  She takes a low paying job as a security guard on an ancient spaceship.  The ship holds the cryogenically frozen bodies of a prophet, more than 100 years dead, and the wealthy people who chose to be frozen with him.  Halley visited the ship as a young child when it was a museum but in recent years it has been maintained by a trust.  She feels it is a great place to hide out while deciding what to do next.

At first it seems like an easy job where she does rounds and pushes a security button to show that all is well.  However, the timing of the rounds and her own stress begin to make her sleep deprivation all the worse.  Is her imagination playing tricks on her or is there something else going on?  The only company she really has on the huge ship is a sophisticated AI program in the museum auditorium which can sometimes answer questions in real time and the frozen folks.  I would not choose to talk to either but her loneliness begins to grate.  Lack of sleep doesn't help.  And the engineer somewhere else on the ship refuses to really talk to her.

There is a lot about Halley's circumstances on board the ship that I found to be unrealistic.  Halley is a character hard to feel sympathetic towards given her privileged background and very bad choices.  However, as the novel progressed, I found that I wanted her to succeed.  Halley just wants to have purpose and help people.  She may have went about it completely incorrectly but in the end, she makes up for it.  Plus the real circumstances and truth of the ship should happen to no one.  Ugh.  As a poor sleeper, I also began to think about how lack of sleep can cause cognitive dysfunction and how that could be contributing to Halley's predicament, her missing key facts, and her second guessing.

The ending was one of the aspects of the novel that felt most realistic.  Halley pays for her bad choices, not everyone survives, and what happens to the AI was refreshing in that "science magic" can't solve everything.  There is a small amount of hope but the ending felt right for the story.

I love the author's excellent space horrors and want more!  These standalones are excellent fun.  Arrr! 

I received a copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.