Ol' St. Nick

by Raven Oak

When a mobster Santa dies, everyone's a suspect!What do you get when you mix an old Earth myth with mobsters and space ships? A locked room mystery with holiday trimmings involving the plucky crew of a scavenger ship.

Captain Mark Barnes has but one keep his ship flying and his crew happy. But when someone from his past tears their way into the present, everyone on his ship becomes a murder suspect, including himself.

Especially himself.

Time’s running out as Mark and his crew struggle to find the murderer among them, because if they don’t, they just might kill one another. When a family falls apart, can the damage be repaired? Or will this holiday go down in history as a complete and utter disaster?

87 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 3, 2021

About the author

Multi-international award-winning speculative fiction author and artist Raven Oak (she/they) is best known for Amaskan’s Blood (2016 Ozma Fantasy Award Winner, Epic Awards Finalist, & Reader’s Choice Award Winner), Amaskan’s War (2018 UK Wishing Award YA Finalist), and Class-M Exile. With over a dozen short stories in various anthologies, she's even published on the moon! Raven spent most of her K-12 education doodling and writing 500 page monstrosities that are forever locked away in a filing cabinet.

Besides being a writer and artist, she’s a geeky, disabled ENBY who enjoys getting her game on with tabletop games, indulging in cartography and art, or staring at the ocean. She lives in the Seattle area with her partner, and their three kitties who enjoy lounging across the keyboard when writing deadlines approach. Her hair color changes as often as her bio does, and you can find her at www.ravenoak.net.

Reviews

[Jennyfer]

Deep in space, in a distant future when seasonal Earth traditions are a thing of the past, a salvage operation goes wrong when a figure dressed as the historical figure of Santa Claus turns up very much dead. And thus begins a closed-room mystery where everyone is a suspect and secrets are unearthed.

A space opera with holiday traditions, murder and mobsters, this was a fun, fast-paced read. Well written, it gave the feeling of a holiday special episode from a long-running series - we have no backstory of the characters, instead we are thrown into their world and hit the ground running.

~Many thanks to NetGalley for providing a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review~

[Julia Sarene · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ol' St. Nick by Raven Oak is a Christmassy SciFi with a bit of murder mystery.

I'm always a sucker for anything that combines SFF and Christmas, so I enjoyed this a whole lot more than I would have, if it was any other topic.

The story was a bit confusing at times, and I would have liked the whole thing a bit longer to get more of a grasp for the characters, but for a quick bite between the big books, it was quite fun to read!