The Explorer

Cormac Easton is a journalist, not an astronaut. A place on the Ishiguro was given to him so that someone could record the first crewed mission into deep space, and he expects to write a triumph.

The crew begin to die instead, one after another. Each death can be explained on its own terms, but taken together they cannot be explained at all.

Cormac ends up the last person aboard. He cannot turn the ship around, and he keeps writing an account that nobody is likely to read while the distance to Earth grows.

This is the first book of the Anomaly Quartet, literary science fiction with a cold, claustrophobic feel. It sits nearer to a locked-room mystery than to a space adventure. Partway through, the story shifts direction, and the first half takes on a different meaning.

The answers arrive for the reader at exactly the speed and in the sequence Cormac finds them, shut in with him on the ship.