Dark Run – Mike Brooks

Mike Brooks’ debut novel, and the first in the Keiko trilogy, Dark Run is a characterful, fast-paced sci-fi adventure featuring smugglers, pirates, hitmen and hackers, in a not-so distant future where people travel fast, information travels slow, and if you’re lucky you can keep moving and stay ahead of your past. To the crew of the Keiko, Captain Ichabod Drift is a rogue and a scoundrel, but also a largely reliable and usually friendly face. When Drift’s history finally catches up with him, however, he’s forced to take on a mission which endangers everyone’s lives and risks revealing some dark secrets from his past.

Right from the off it’s a pacy and entertaining read with a great eye for sharp dialogue, a compelling protagonist in the charismatic Drift and a strong dynamic between the wildly divergent personalities of the Keiko’s crew. It starts off like a sci-fi western, all filthy dive bars and dangerous gangs in dank underground settlements – a bit like Necromunda, if you’re familiar with the Warhammer 40,000 sub-setting (and not the only 40k influence) – and quickly introduces the crew, setting up relationships and rivalries that largely hold true throughout the story. Drift is sort of half father figure, half liability, while his crew range from the poker-faced, stone-cold killer Rourke and sour mercenary Micah to bickering twins Jia and Kuai, not-so-gentle Apirana and young ‘slicer’ Jenna, the latter two forming an unlikely friendship as the giant Mauri opens up to the nervous youngster.

After a fun first fifty-or-so pages it then broadens out into more of a space opera vibe, introducing a bit more of the wider setting but keeping things fairly grounded and character-focused as Drift rather nervously persuades his crew to take on a new mission after an unexpected (and unwelcome) visit from an old employer. Rather than going heavy on the extra-planetary world building, Brooks creates an engaging setting by extrapolating out from the present-day state of the real world, even returning to Earth before starting to explore outwards again. Drift’s mission involves a risky illicit cargo run – the titular Dark Run – through the security of Old Earth to a dropoff point at a Dutch exhibition centre of all places, before the smuggling takes a back seat in favour of an even riskier plan which requires all of the crew’s hard-earned skills and experience to pull off.

It’s not a tech-heavy space opera; there are plenty of cool gadgets, spaceships and wildly inventive locations for, but the emphasis is firmly on the characters and their relationships in the context of an engaging, band-of-misfits action adventure. There’s barely a character who isn’t a scoundrel of some sort, but the protagonists at least are largely lovable (well…likeable) rogues rather than out-and-out anti-heroes, and Brooks writes them with snarky, snappy dialogue, compelling back stories and an enjoyable sense of diversity. There’s little sense that Brooks is trying to break new ground with this, instead concentrating on telling a gripping, entertaining story featuring great characters struggling to get along and work together and pull off a dangerous scam. It’s tremendous fun and brilliantly readable, and suggests that there’s plenty more entertainment to be had following the crew of the Keiko on future missions.

Click this link to buy Dark Run (or this one to buy the audiobook version).