The Dark Side

by Anthony O'Neill

Overview

In this dark and gripping sci-fi noir, an exiled police detective arrives at a lunar penal colony just as a psychotic android begins a murderous odyssey across the far side of the moon.

Purgatory is the lawless moon colony of eccentric billionaire, Fletcher Brass: a mecca for war criminals, murderers, sex fiends, and adventurous tourists. You can’t find better drugs, cheaper plastic surgery, or a more ominous travel advisory anywhere in the universe. But trouble is brewing in Brass’s black-market heaven. When an exiled cop arrives in this wild new frontier, he immediately finds himself investigating a string of ruthless assassinations in which Brass himself—and his equally ambitious daughter—are the chief suspects.

Meanwhile, two-thousand kilometers away, an amnesiac android, Leonardo Black, rampages across the lunar surface. Programmed with only the notorious “Brass Code”—a compendium of corporate laws that would make Ayn Rand blush—Black has only one goal in mind: to find Purgatory and conquer it.

Visual, visceral, and tons of fun, The Dark Side fuses hard science with brutal crime and lunar adventure. It’s an intense, stylish, and action-packed thriller with a body count to match.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501119569
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	06/28/2016
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Anthony O’Neill is the son of an Irish policeman and an Australian stenographer. He was born in Melbourne and lives in Edinburgh.

Read an Excerpt

The Dark Side

ONLY A LUNATIC WOULD live on the Moon.

The Moon is a dead rock—eighty-one quintillion tons of dead rock. It’s been dead for nearly four billion years. And—inasmuch as a dead rock wants anything—it wants you dead too.

So you can go quickly. A landslide can bury you. A lava tube can collapse on you. You can plunge headlong into a crater. A meteoroid can strike your habitat at seventy thousand kilometers per hour. A micrometeorite can bust open your spacesuit. A sudden burst of static electricity can blow you apart in an airlock. A slip, a cut, a ruptured seal, a faulty oxygen tank can kill you in minutes.

Or you can go a little slower. A wiring malfunction can shut down air filters. A corrupted computer program can play havoc with climate-control systems. A particularly nasty pathogen—mutant strains of bacteria flourish in enclosed environments—can kill you in days. If you’re out on the surface, the sudden temperature plunge between sunlight and shade can leave you with thermal shock. A solar flare can toast you like a TV dinner. A vehicular breakdown can leave you suffocating in your spacesuit.

Or you can go incrementally, over the course of years. Moondust can work its way like asbestos into the deepest fissures of your lungs. Prolonged exposure to chemical vapors and gas leaks can wreck your whole respiratory system. Reduced gravity—one-sixth that of Earth—can fatally weaken your heart. Cosmic radiation—galactic rays from dead suns and black holes—can warp your cells. Not to mention a cocktail of psychological factors—sensory deprivation, insomnia, paranoia, claustrophobia, loneliness, hallucinations—that can reshuffle your mind like a deck of cards.

On the Moon, in short, you can be killed by the environment. You can be killed by accident. Or you can kill yourself.

And then of course you can always be murdered. By gangsters. By terrorists. By psychopaths. By ideologues. Or simply because you cost too much to keep alive.

Only a lunatic—or a renegade, or a pariah, or a misanthrope, or a risk junkie, or a mass murderer—would live permanently on the Moon.

Editorial Reviews

03/14/2016
Noir reigns supreme in this mystery set on the far side of the Moon. Damien Justus is the new lieutenant in Sin, the major city in billionaire criminal tycoon Fletcher Brass’s colony on Earth’s moon. Settled by fugitives from Earth, Sin is not accustomed to the honest police work and hard-boiled ethics that Justus delivers, though he might be exactly what the city needs. Somebody is assassinating Sin’s elite, and Justus doesn’t yet know lunar politics well enough to suss out the outright lies from mere misdirection. Meanwhile, a homicidal android with delusions of grandeur is taking advantage of a communications blackout to murder his way across the Moon in search of El Dorado, or Oz, or anywhere else he might conquer. The story is rife with morbid humor and tense action that make excellent use of the setting. Some readers might be shocked to find themselves cheering for a killer robot who’s never heard of the Tin Man but wants to be the Wizard; some might wish that O’Neill had omitted the traditional noir mistreatment of female characters. The rest will be too busy chuckling to look below the surface. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"Inspired lunacy...satisfying on every level."—The Wall Street Journal

"A smart, rollicking sf-detective-noir genre-blendwith a delightfully dark and snide sense of humor...This incredibly entertaining novel is unmitigated fun to read, and is sure to be at the top of many genre readers' favorite books of the year."—Booklist, Starred Review

“The Dark Side is what would happen if Raymond Chandler met Arthur C. Clarke while Isaac Asimov lurked in the shadows. It’s a two-fisted lunar detective story that has everything I’ve ever loved in a book. A good cop. A corrupt system. Mysterious murders. Moon colonies. Chase scenes. Killer robots. A damn fun book!”—Peter Clines, author of The Fold, 14, and the Ex-Heroes series

"Noir reigns supreme in this mystery set on the far side of the Moon. Rife with morbid humor and tense action that makes excellent use of the setting." –Publishers Weekly

"[O'Neill's] characters have enormous appeal—even the ones you're aware are about to be horrifically murdered. And to relieve the grimness he offers his trademark weird puns, flashes of wit, and mordant humor...Reveling in the low gravity, a yarn that bounds along in fine style, spraying gore and body parts."—Kirkus Reviews

“Writing as sharp as a nanofilament dagger, a story as dark as the space between stars. And disgracefully, bizarrely, irresistibly funny.”—John Birmingham, author of The Axis of Time series

From the Publisher

★ 05/15/2016
When you've run afoul of the law on planet Earth, there is one final stop in the criminal justice system: the dark side of the moon, where lawbreakers walk free in a colony called Sin. Founder Fletcher Brass operates the city as his own private fiefdom, but he is in a power struggle with his daughter QT. Police Lt. Damien Justus (pronounced differently but still a pretty hokey name to give a lawman) is new to the moon, and his first case is the murder of a prominent criminal associate of Brass. Meanwhile, an android is slowly making its way toward Sin, killing everyone standing in its way. The idea of a no-holds-barred den of thieves and murderers on the moon is a great premise, but the story line here is thinly developed. VERDICT Despite a nice noir touch with Justus as the lone honest man in a corrupt landscape, O'Neill's debut is a near miss, marred by the android's actions, which should be menacing but are instead simply appallingly brutal.—MM

Library Journal

2016-03-30
An incorruptible cop tackles a series of mysterious assassinations in a virtually lawless moon colony; in a not unrelated development, a homicidal android searches for Oz, leaving no survivors in his wake. In sum, it's another intriguingly bizarre thriller noir from the author of The Unscratchables (which was published under the pseudonym Cornelius Kane, 2009), etc. Twenty years ago, on the far side of the moon, megalomaniac oligarch Fletcher Brass founded Purgatory as a refuge for Earth's worst criminals. Brass lives by his own atrocious Brass Code and seems to be locked in a power struggle with his equally steely daughter, QT…or so it appears to newbie police officer Damien Justus, formerly of Las Vegas. Among the victims of a bomb explosion, Justus learns, were Fletcher's right-hand man, while another dead man spied for QT. The other cops barely go through the motions of investigating, since if Brass is involved, it's highly preferable to know nothing. Meanwhile, out on Farside's dusty, cratered surface, an impeccably attired android programmed with the Brass Code ("Never bang your head against a wall. Bang someone else's"; "Find Oz. And be the Wizard"; "Friends help you get there. Everyone else is vermin," etc.), each provision of which he considers a "sacred verse," heads for Purgatory, slaughtering anybody who impedes him according to the Code's remorseless logic. This concept, despite the dazzling details and gritty texture, bears a certain generic similarity to the author's other yarns and makes no claim to originality. Still, his characters have enormous appeal—even the ones you're aware are about to be horrifically murdered. And to relieve the grimness he offers his trademark weird puns, flashes of wit, and mordant humor. Reveling in the low gravity, a yarn that bounds along in fine style, spraying gore and body parts.

Kirkus Reviews

This stark, shining work is powerfully told by Steve West, whose character portrayals and command of accents are mind-boggling. One minute he's the hard-as-nails police detective who is transferred to the hellish town of Purgatory, on the dark side of the moon. Next, he is a dysfunctional, serial-killing android that speaks in a polite British accent when he’s not wiping out those in his path. Then, he's the boorish Fletcher Brass, the billionaire who runs the town, which is a place of last resort for killers, perverts, war criminals, and brave tourists. There are so many incredible events, observations, and details in this novel that listeners will find themselves stopping and pondering their ramifications even as the characters take them for granted. M.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

SEPTEMBER 2016 - AudioFile

This stark, shining work is powerfully told by Steve West, whose character portrayals and command of accents are mind-boggling. One minute he's the hard-as-nails police detective who is transferred to the hellish town of Purgatory, on the dark side of the moon. Next, he is a dysfunctional, serial-killing android that speaks in a polite British accent when he’s not wiping out those in his path. Then, he's the boorish Fletcher Brass, the billionaire who runs the town, which is a place of last resort for killers, perverts, war criminals, and brave tourists. There are so many incredible events, observations, and details in this novel that listeners will find themselves stopping and pondering their ramifications even as the characters take them for granted. M.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

SEPTEMBER 2016 - AudioFile