wee doors banging

Chindi is another in Jack McDevitt’s “Academy” series. True to form, it is an adventure romp across the galaxy to investigate a Mysterious Thing(tm), with daring rescues and dangerous situations to get out of along the way.

If you rewrote The Da Vinci Code as a science fiction novel, but ten times better, you’d get something like Chindi. It’s an action movie of a book. The pace and unfolding mystery is enough to keep you turning the pages to see what happens next or how the returning heroine Captain Priscilla “Hutch” Hutchings will save the day again with a daring plan that’s clearly crazy but might just work.

Hutch is a woman fighting against irresistable forces pulling her in directions she doesn’t want to go. She desires retirement from the life of a starship captain and a quiet life back on Earth, but is cajoled into sitting in the big chair one more time to lead a mission to investigate artificial signals discovered around a far away star.

She becomes the reluctant leader of the clueless crew of civilians, academics and media stars – members of an alien contact enthusiast society – that have hired her services to take them to investigate the signal. As the mission progresses, she is time and again forced to act against her better judgement and override her captain’s duty to protect her charges in favour of the dangerous or ill-advised desires of the paying customers. She does what she can, but inevitibly it all goes wrong (several times) and Hutch is called upon to use her ingenuity and skill to pull the crew out of the danger of their own making. You sympathise with Hutch, as she is dragged along against her will.

McDevitt pulls off the adventure and investigation part well enough, if at a breakneck pace, with imaginative descriptions of the exotic locations the crew find themselves in. The science is also sound enough to not annoy. However the supporting crew characters are for the most part cardboard cutouts that are all too similar and largely interchangeable. I often lost track of who was speaking, but then realised it didn’t really matter anyway as much of the chat was simply exposition of the next stage in the adventure. This is where the Da Vinci Code comparisons come in. What non-exposition interaction there is is well written though.

The Chindi, the big secret, while a good, non-obvious idea, is something of a disappointment in reading. Too little is made of it, its creators or the reasons for its existence. This book feels very much like the first part of a larger story: much is introduced but it’s all left hanging at the end with little or no explanation. I’m glad that the mystery is revisited (three books later) in Cauldron because, taken alone, the ending of Chindi is a cop-out. It’s more satisfying than Engines of God or Deepsix, both of which left me looking for the missing final chapters, but McDevitt still hasn’t learned how to write a good ending. Third time’s not a charm, unfortunately.

Chindi can stand alone, but I’d advise reading the preceeding books first for a better grounding in the Academy universe. I’d also strongly consider picking up the sequels at the same time as this book or you may be disappointed. It’s is an entertaining page-turner that you’ll fly through and you’ll want to read the rest of the series to see how it turns out, but don’t expect too much.