Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes

 

This is ... not a horrible SF/Horror novel--the antecedents are obvious, but there are ideas stick around for decent reasons. It's clear, though, that Ms. Barnes isn't coming from as hard-SF a place as, say, Elizabeth Bear: at one point she seems to act as though the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt are the same (they're very much not); and she flubs some details, such as describing a baby grand piano as having four legs--the grand pianos I've interacted with (including moving one) have had three; and the vessels in the novel seem to move at the speed of plot, with little concept of just how vast the distances are even inside the Solar System. Those are mostly niggles, though--the story is mostly fine, the characters reasonably well-drawn, the structure (lots of flashbacks for a while) clearly handled; but the big reveal at the end vaguely reminds me of an old Three Investigators novel ...