Rating: 4 stars
Buy Link:
Amazon | iBooks | Amazon UK
Length: Novella


Maggie McLean is a pilot who carries cargo through deep space. It wasn’t where she saw her life going, but when asked to make a life-defining choice, Maggie stood her ground. Taking a shortcut, Maggie is injured and comes upon another ship that will not answer her distress calls. That ship is The Swift, the ship everyone has been looking for, including Maggie, for that ship held two hundred and thirty-six crew members, including Maggie’s wife, Helene. When The Swift vanished, it left Maggie with a lot of unanswered questions and she is determined to find out what happened and to bring Helene home. But there is a lot to uncover in deep space and Maggie may wind up with a lot of unexpected answers.

This sci-fi offering falls into the long novella/short novel range. For what was offered here, it was the perfect length to start Maggie’s story. We aren’t told what year it is, but with Maggie being a cargo pilot in space (similar to being a present day trucker), we know it’s somewhere in the future. The book takes place solely in space, and we also are not told much of what life is like on Earth during this time.

Maggie is a character who evolves slowly as the book moves forward and it’s best to discover her as she finally begins to discover and accept herself. There are a few storylines going on here in a small amount of time, but they all build on each other and weave together in a way that has a natural fit. There are a few things going on here: Maggie being injured and lost in space. Maggie finding the lost ship that her wife had been traveling on and that is now abandoned (well mostly abandoned). Maggie being a prodigy pilot that was destined for a military career and we learn about that as the story unfolds. Maggie starting to come to terms with how she was born and who she is and being proud of who she is. And, there is Lidia—and that’s all I can really say about her without giving too much away, although I do have some questions.

This book is not a romance, at least not yet. Maggie is looking for her missing wife, Helene, and there is a painful story there as well. But there is also new attraction in Maggie’s sights. The story mostly takes us through what happened on the missing ship as Maggie is determined to figure it out. This part of the story did get slow in middle and when Maggie does find out more, it was a little too tame for me and followed a route that was too basic to keep the intrigue. The book also uses song lyrics mixed into the narrative to prove some points along the way, but after a while it became more confusing than helpful to me and detracted more than added to the story as it went on. But Maggie is an interesting character to get to know and she rises up and along with Lidia, they hold this story together and I was fully engaged most of the time.

Like the First Moon Landing is book one in this series and will be a continuing story. A preview to book two is given at the end and it is from a different character’s perspective and Metzger has me hooked on yet another series with evolving and intriguing characters.