Flight 404 / The Hunt for Red Leicester by Simon Petrie

Flight 404 / The Hunt for Red Leicester Reviews

• 
  Phillip Berrie

  Two great stories in one small book: one for thought, and one for fun.
  
  I picked up this book because it has a Gordon Mamon story in it, and I am a fan of that character. To my mind, he is probably one of the more interesting fictional detectives out there, being the ad hoc detective on board a space elevator that takes three days to make its transit from geostationary orbit to ground.
  
  What makes these stories fun for me are the puns and word plays the author liberally sprinkles into these stories. This time, the actual story itself wasn't as good as others I have read, but it did give me a better insight into the character himself. Gordon Mamon is a puzzle solver, be it a 3-dimensional crossword puzzle, or why someone accosted him and left him lying stark naked in a ladies restroom. His disinterest in the ramifications as to why the mystery he was involved with occurred, says a lot about this character.
  
  Flight 404, which takes up the majority of this small book, is also a futuristic mystery. The main character is a transgender spaceship pilot who has a personal interest in finding out what happened to a missing space liner carrying thousands of people. For me, the most interesting aspects of the story were how the author realistically handled some of the problems with travelling and communicating over the vast distances involved. I also appreciated how they affected the story
  
  Your mileage may differ and I would understand if you found the author too wordy, the average number of words per sentence is very high.
• 
  Dion Perry

  This book is two stories in one and they are quite different, so I will review them separately.
  
  Flight 404
  
  When a spaceship goes missing, Charmaine hastens to its last known location to join the search. En route she discovers a number of anomalies and concludes that nothing is as it should be. Her own life is also now in danger.
  
  Flight 404 is nothing like what I thought it would be. Although there is a detective story hidden within the strong scifi themes, the book is as much about the protagonist owning her sexual identity as it is anything else. The story wasn’t quite my cup of tea, but it was a powerful story and I am pleased I read it through to the end. Petrie has mixed deep themes with mystery and intrigue to produce an unusual but very readable story. If you can handle a bit of depth this one if for you.
  
  The hunt for Red Leicester
  
  A hotel worker is knocked unconscious, tied up and shove in the ladies’ toilet. His co-worker, Belle, discovers him along with a dead man who happens to be a big cheese in the cheese industry. They go to the police but they are snowed under with other cases and so they set out to solve the mystery themselves.
  
  The book is not only full of intrigue and mystery it is light-hearted and fun. I couldn’t put it down and was sorry it was as short as it was. The only thing I didn’t like was the ending, but hoping there’s a sequel on the horizon I’ll forgive this. If you like humorous detective stories this one is for you.
• 
  M. Darusha Wehm

  These two stories are about as different as chalk and cheese. So, they require two separate reviews.
  
  The Hunt for Red Leicester is like fondue. The science fiction and mystery elements are the bread fo the tale, there to provide a solid basis for all that lovely gooey cheese. And by cheese, I mean puns. I laughed aloud at much of the wordplay (Sweet Baby Cheeses - OMG!) and they are so cleverly interwoven into the story that the actual plot would be greatly diminished by the lack of them.
  
  Gordon Mamon, the hotel detective at the heart of this story, is a favourite character of mine for his classic detective stylings crossed with a reluctance to do any work whatsoever that rings funny and true. This caper is a terrifically complex one, which had me guessing as to how it would possibly all play out for much of the story. Fun. Very fun.
  
  Flight 404, on the other hand, is not fun at all. A serious, rock solidly hard SF tale of fundamentalism, greed, space travel and authenticity. Charmain, the narrator, is a believable, flawed and complex character, who finds herself in her abandoned homeland in the middle of a search for a missing spaceliner. In the process, she is forced to deal with her past - the people she left behind when she left her home and the reasons she felt she could no longer stay.
  
  On the face of it, this story is about what happens to the missing spaceship, but it's really about how the choices we make affect our futures, how we interact with the memories of people from our past, how we strive to be true to ourselves. While fundamentally a story about people, Flight 404 doesn't disappoint in the science department. Science literally solves the puzzle.
  
  My only complaint is that the bundling of these two stories is a bit odd. I certainly loved both, but many people who would enjoy one might not find the other to their taste.
• 
  Tsana Dolichva

  Flight 404 by Simon Petrie is a science fictional novella set in the mid-distant future with interplanetary travel possible but not as common and easy as an intercontinental flight now.
  
  The main character, Charmain, is piloting a small ship, one of many sent to investigate and search for the remains of a large, missing passenger liner. The main action of the plot deals with the search for the liner, both Charmain's and others' and the mystery surrounding its disappearance.
  
  We are also treated to a lot of Charmain's backstory. It turns out that Charmain has more of a personal stake in the missing liner than she realised at the outset. And furthermore, her life as a trans person in a conservative society (before she left to become a pilot) wasn't exactly a barrel of laughs. The backstory elements blend well with the main story, particularly since the Epsilon Eridani system where the missing liner is thought to be, contains the planet of her birth.
  
  I enjoyed both the story and the physics in Flight 404. My long-time followers will probably be aware that scientific plausibility is very important to me. There were no gaffes, which made me happy and which is just as well since Petrie works, when not writing speculative fiction, in computational quantum chemistry. It was also nice to see non-trivial sociological issues — Charmain's gender identity — tackled in a hard science fictional setting. (I've seen Bujold do similar, but I don't think it's otherwise very common.)
  
  In my edition of Flight 404 (purchased as a standalone novella from the publisher), there was also a bonus (reprint) story, "Broadwings", about a family living on Titan and the difficulties of doing so. Also enjoyable.
  
  Flight 404 was an excellent read and I highly recommend it to all fans of science fiction. I will definitely be searching out more of Petrie's work in the future.
  
  4.5 / 5 stars
  
  You can read more of my reviews on
  my blog.
• 
  Kelly

  Set in a far flung future, ‘Flight 404’ by Simon Petrie combines two stories into one novella. The first is the mystery surrounding the disappearance of the passenger liner, Bougainvillea. The second is the mystery surrounding Charmain Mertz’s past. There appears to be little relationship between one and the other, but the two entwined threads do complement one another, each adding depth and personal experience to the whole.
  
  Charmain’s thoughts are somewhat discombobulated as she returns to Ashe, the conservative planet of her birth. When she learns her sister and family were aboard the passenger liner, her mission becomes more personal. Reaching out to people she used to know triggers memories, some unwelcome, even if informative, but these interactions ultimately help her unravel the puzzle of the massive spacecraft’s disappearance. As facts are revealed, so is her past and, as the mystery is solved, Charmain seems to come to terms with herself. For every loss, there is a gain.
  
  Simon Petrie’s writing style is a little different. I like the way he uses words. ‘Flight 404’ is easy to read and the construction of the plot, from Charmain’s arrival in the system to her discovery of what actually did happen to the Bougainvillea is logical and well-paced. The interspersed conversations with childhood friends pad the story, giving it more substance. Though I did wonder at the relevance of Charmain’s past, it’s not completely out of place. Her personal quest was inspiring and the emotion with which it was delivered should strike a chord with most readers.
  
  Written for and originally published at
  SFCrowsnest.
• 
  Geoffrey Harrison

  A great read
  
  This was a slightly deceptive book. The cover initially really put me off, but it kept showing up on my Kindle app as a recomendation. Eventually I relented, I looked at the synopsis and I am glad I did.
  
  The synopsis is:
  
  "To solve the mystery of the Bougainvillaea's disappearance, investigator/pilot Charmain Mertz must return to the conservative world of her boyhood."
  
  That got me intrigued. I decided to ignore the cover.
  
  The book is narrated in first person, which is a format I quite like, but at first this was slightly confusing when the narrative turned to simulated conversations between the protagonist and her android.
  
  There is a limited cast in the story, which can lead to a claustrophobic tale at times. I think this added to the fact that the protagonist was flying solo through the blackness of space.
  
  All of the physics used were very good and well thought out using what appears to be realistic details (I'm not a physicist) and is one of the really great parts of the story.
• 
  S.B. Wright

  Review in progress