The Ninth Metal (The Comet Cycle #1) by Benjamin Percy

I think Benjamin Percy is becoming a favorite author. I mean, I’ve only read one other book of his, Red Moon (my review), but his imagination is quite something. When I saw that he had a new book coming out and that it was available on NetGalley, I knew I had to try to and get an ARC.

So a big thank you to NetGalley and Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for providing me a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. This did not impact my review in any way.

Blurb: IT BEGAN WITH A COMET…

At first, people gazed in wonder at the radiant tear in the sky. A year later, the celestial marvel became a planetary crisis when Earth spun through the comet’s debris field and the sky rained fire.

The town of Northfall, Minnesota will never be the same. Meteors cratered hardwood forests and annihilated homes, and among the wreckage a new metal was discovered. This “omnimetal” has properties that make it world-changing as an energy source…and a weapon.

John Frontier—the troubled scion of an iron-ore dynasty in Northfall—returns for his sister’s wedding to find his family embroiled in a cutthroat war to control mineral rights and mining operations. His father rightly suspects foreign leaders and competing corporations of sabotage, but the greatest threat to his legacy might be the US government. Physicist Victoria Lennon was recruited by the Department of Defense to research omnimetal, but she finds herself trapped in a laboratory of nightmares. And across town, a rookie cop is investigating a murder that puts her own life in the crosshairs. She will have to compromise her moral code to bring justice to this now lawless community.

In this gut-punch of a novel, the first in his Comet Cycle, Ben Percy lays bare how a modern-day goldrush has turned the middle of nowhere into the center of everything, and how one family—the Frontiers—hopes to control it all.

I’m not even sure how to express all my thoughts or even how to do so in a way that makes sense. This book has a lot going on and Percy somehow makes it all work. I’ve come to really enjoy his writing; in this novel he takes us on a speculative ride into his new world that feels like our reality but is at the same not.

Benjamin Percy has a way with bringing humanity to life on paper in all aspects, including the not so pretty ones. I thought that The Ninth Metal was a great mixture and balance of character- and plot-driven. Speaking of characters, we get the POVs of John Frontier, Victoria Lennon, and Stacie, the rookie cop with a couple of small secondary character POVs thrown in. I felt like we got enough time with each of these three characters to get a good sense of who they are, however, I could tell (hopefully) that Percy was just skimming the surface. There are two more books, so I imagine that we’ll get to know them even more plus a couple of the other characters better.

“Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.“ – Theodore Roosevelt

The plot was pretty action packed but still had depth. There was either something going on with the Frontier family and their business, someone trying to kill this person or did kill this person; this person gets kidnapped. And all this time, the Frontier business is competing with one other big mining company over this one big spot that is supposed to have a huge vein of the omnimetal. And that all ends up connecting to Victoria and what’s happening in her DOD lab. I got hooked fairly early on in the book and kept wanting to know how it all was supposed to come together. I also liked that it wasn’t super heavy on the sci-fi elements .. it’s definitely a mixture of sci-fi with it’s subgenre of dystopia with some action/adventure reminiscent of Westerns thrown in. Oh and some superhero elements too.

Weirdly, the book didn’t end in a cliffhanger, which is something that I both liked and disliked; it was just very vague. I am definitely interested enough to want to pick up the next book (hopefully I remember to do so).

Have you had the chance to read any Benjamin Percy novels? Does this new Sci-Fi, genre bending novel pique your interest at all?

Thank you to NetGalley and publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for kindly providing me a free copy in exchange for an honest review. This has not impacted my review in any way.