Throughout his 25-year career as a copywriter, Colin Brush has penned the cover copy for over 5,000 books. Armed with a mastery of language and a keen understanding of compelling storytelling, he knows precisely what gets readers hooked. His words have helped sell the work of countless authors over the years; now, he’s putting his talents to use in his own debut novel. Exo follows octogenarian detective Mae Jameson as she races against the end of the world to solve the mysterious murder of a rogue scientist. Here’s everything you need to know before the book hits shelves on November 18!
Trigger Warning: Exo contains discussions of suicide and infant death. Please exercise personal care while reading.
Synopsis
Humanity has fled to the stars, leaving its dying home planet behind to seek salvation among lunar colonies and orbital dwellings. Earth, now abandoned save for a handful of lonely inhabitants, has been overtaken by the Caul: a perplexing liquid entity that annihilates anyone who heeds its silent siren song and enters its deadly depths. Among those remaining on Earth are the scientists, desperately trying to find a way to reverse the Caul, and the penitents, scavengers able to resist the Caul’s compulsions.
Penitent Mae Jameson, formerly a Service agent, came to Earth 30 years ago in search of her husband. Since then, she’s lived an isolated existence, embroiled in never-ending grief at her unresolved loss and distrustful of her fellow penitents. One day, she encounters Siofra, daughter of rogue scientist Carl Magellan, wandering alone at the Caul’s edge. Upon returning the girl home, Mae finds Carl dead. Murdered. Unable to ignore her investigative instincts, Mae delves into Carl’s journals. There, she discovers insights into the Caul’s greatest mysteries. Now, the question remains: Who was willing to kill to keep this information quiet, and can Mae unmask them before she becomes the next victim?
An Atmospheric Sci-Fi Murder Mystery
Behind her, twisting metal groans, concrete percussively cracks, and walls stop being walls. Dimensions uncoil. Space burps and foams. She can’t see it, but she feels a shuddering deep in her bones. Registering the cries of the left behind—the three whose disappeared limbs prevented them running with the others who got out ahead of her—she resists any urge to glance back. This is the point of no return.
— Colin Brush, Exo
Colin Brush’s electrifying debut, Exo, raises the stakes of the mystery genre to planetary proportions. This inventive whodunit maps the darkest parts of the human soul — our sinful ambitions, our fathomless fears, our unutterable desires — to deliver a cerebral speculative thriller in the vein of Jeff VanderMeer. More than a mere murder mystery, Exo is an interrogation of our basest instincts, asking: How far would you be willing to go for your convictions? Endlessly twisty and unceasingly clever, Brush’s first foray into fiction will have mystery and sci-fi fans hungry for more.
A Deft Dual-Timeline Narrative
Before me, a vast grayness stretched away endlessly. What I saw filled me up. I’d seen oceans of methane on Titan, sulphur lakes on Venus. I’d skimmed through thousand-year-old storms on Jupiter. But this rolling gray liquid, stinking of hot metal, with its waves processing up the slope of the beach and tumbling into a seething white froth that retreated over the pebbles with a volcanic hiss, whose booming and shushing along the huge shore gathered into an echoing roar that to my ears lay somewhere between the angry scramble of white noise and the happy drone of foraging bees, this endless gray which appeared restlessly unstill all the way to the horizon where it met the cloudless azure of the sky in a sharp and distinct break like the very end of the world, this entity horrified me.
— Colin Brush, Exo
Exo unfolds through the eyes of two key figures: Mae Jameson, our dogged detective, and Carl Magellan, the enigmatic scientist whose murder catalyzes the novel’s central mystery. In Mae’s present-day perspective, we see the fallout of Carl’s untimely demise and the layers of conspiracy Mae’s murder investigation exposes. Meanwhile, Carl’s point of view is presented in the form of journal entries, detailing everything from the moment he first arrived on Earth to the scientific discoveries that led to his assassination. In these interweaving timelines, past and present mingle, victim and investigator commune, to unravel the convoluted web of competing interests at play along the Caul’s shore.
A Haunting Rumination on Grief
Dust in her heart, in her head. Lives ground down by endless, marching time. So much dust.
— Colin Brush, Exo
It was how the Caul got to you, reaching inside you and finding your weakness. Unravelling you. Revealing your own deep time, the dust within you. The dead past the grit around which the pearl of the future accumulated. Death at the heart of life.
Mae Jameson is a walking specter. Despite the odds, she’s resisted the Caul’s lure and survived for over 30 years along its shores. But somewhere along the way, she forgot how to live. When she first came to Earth, it was with the single-minded purpose of finding her husband, the person who gave her existence meaning. Three decades later, Mae still has no closure, leaving her in a liminal state between hope and despair, life and death. In Exo, Colin Brush marries Mae’s quest for answers with her healing journey. Her purpose reignited by Carl’s murder investigation, Mae is finally able to confront her grief — for her lost husband, her lost home, her lost sense of self — and find the peace that’s evaded her for so long.
A Timely Commentary on Our Relationship With Earth
‘I accepted years ago that Earth can’t redeem us,’ he said, the words slow now, coming sparingly. ‘For too long … we’ve hoped to rescue this planet, despite being the ones to ravage it. And when it turned against us … we thought we could figure out the problem and solve it. We’d save Earth and in doing so save ourselves. That’s always been our mistake. Maybe Earth can’t be saved … So where does that leave us?’
— Colin Brush, Exo
In addition to interpersonal politics and murder plots, one of the direst dilemmas facing Exo’s protagonists is an ecological disaster making their home planet increasingly uninhabitable. The Caul, a mystifying gray entity invading Earth’s oceans, is slowly but surely choking out all life — everything from flora to fauna to human beings. Scientists, religious leaders, and politicians alike theorize about the Caul’s origins and what its arrival means for them. Is it an alien invasion? The retribution of an angered god? Some sort of man-made catastrophe?
Exo makes explicit commentary on humanity’s faulty understanding of our relationship with Earth. Although we live here, the planet has never been ours to own, and we can’t control it to the degree we’ve come to believe. If we’re unable to coexist with Earth, it will become — in Mae’s words — our adversary. And as Brush’s characters reluctantly learn, nature doesn’t bend to the will of humanity without a ferocious fight. In light of our current environmental crisis, Brush’s ecological insights are a prescient warning humanity should heed with haste.
Final Thoughts
Colin Brush is a name to watch in the realm of speculative fiction. His breathtaking debut, Exo, emulates sci-fi greats like Kim Stanley Robinson and John Scalzi to explore themes of loss, coexistence, and human nature against the backdrop of a mesmerizing murder mystery. If you’re in the market for a thrilling whodunit with stratospheric stakes, don’t hesitate to give Exo a go.
You’ll love Exo if you enjoyed these books:
- Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
- A Perfect Spy by John le Carré
- Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
- Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
- Redshirts by John Scalzi
Bookstr’s Exo Dream Cast:
- Margaret Avery as Mae Jameson, an octogenarian former detective
- Penn Badgley as Carl Magellan, a rogue scientist
- Hannah John-Kamen as Gemma Magellan, Carl’s wife
- Hunter Schafer as Jean Baré, a young scientist at the Caul research facility
- Angelina Jolie as Dr. Jane Carlyle, director of the facility
If you want to add Exo to your TBR, you can preorder it on Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, and Amazon. Thank you to Diversion Books for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
To read our review of James Zwerneman’s epic historical inspired by ancient Mesopotamia, Uruk: A Novel of the First City, click here!
To browse more books like this, check out Bookstr’s Science Fiction shelf on Bookshop!
