Book review: Beyond the Pool of Stars by Howard Andrew Jones

The thirty-third book I read in 2016 was Beyond the Pool of Stars by Howard Andrew Jones.  It's campaign setting fiction in Paizo Publishing's Golarion setting for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.  Campaign setting fiction, as exemplified by the novels set in the Forgotten Realms, has a pretty terrible reputation and, from the limited examples I've read, usually earns it.  I was surprised, therefore, to find a positive mention of this book in World Magazine's book review section and intrigued enough to pick up a copy.

The story is set in Sargava, a colony of Avistani (read: European) people on the continent of Garund (read; Africa).  The main character is the mixed-race daughter of a white man and his black wife who has returned home for the funeral of her father.  Discovering that the family business, a salvaging operation recovering valuables from sunken ships, is on shaky financial footing, Mirian Raas agrees to take on One Last Job to honor her father's last contract and save her mother and brother from ruin. Of course, the father's death, which appeared to be accidental, turns out to have been not an accident at all, as there are powerful enemies eager to see that this One Last Job not succeed.

This novel presents a diverse set of characters without bludgeoning one over the head with it politically.  In addition to The Race Thing, one of the members of Mirian's expedition is gay, and the author goes beyond human-ish issues with the clients for the One Last Job, the remains of a once-populous tribe of lizardfolk, dwindled to only three individuals.  The lizardfolk have petitioned the government of Sargava for help in retrieving artifacts from the ruins of their ancestral city, in exchange for a percentage of the valuables.  Agents in service to Cheliax, the mother country against which the colony rebelled and declared its independence, were behind the elder Raas's death and now threaten the members of Mirian's expedition, in order to weaken the colonial government, which is on no firmer financial footing than the Raas family.

The characters are well-developed, avoiding the missteps of stereotypes, and genuinely engaging the reader's affection while leaving him on tenterhooks wondering how many of the expedition will survive.  Each death, rather than coming across as the inevitable winnowing of the redshirts, leaves the reader feeling sorry both for the victim and because he is deprived of their further company.  Up until the last chapter, I thought that this would be a five-star rating.  Unfortunately, the end of the novel falls a bit flat.  It feels like the author got rushed, ran long on word-count, or merely settled for quickly setting up the next adventure rather than taking the time to give the characters the time and space to react as realistically and emotionally to the events of the denouement as they did to the earlier action.

Still, I'm pleased to note that a sequel to this book is in the works and look forward to reading more of the advetures of Mirian Raas and her crew.