The Glass Garden

In this equally creepy and campy exoplanetary thriller from Lévai (The Night Library of Sternendach), a deadly garden hides beneath an abandoned space colony. Growing in a cave and resembling a cathedral with stained-glass windows made up of fecund vines, this botanical oddity beckons Lissy, the down on her luck captain of a salvage ship, who first spies the cave’s entrance on a fly-by mission with her boyfriend, Carver, and believes the discovery could make them rich. To persuade her other two crew members—lovers McArdle, a hotshot mechanic, and Tsieh, a quiet, no-frills scientist, who are borderline mutinous after a previous mission went awry—Lissy invites her sister, Theresa, an anthropologist, to come aboard. She’s hoping Theresa’s scholarly credentials will help legitimize and publicize the discovery, but Theresa delays the crew’s dreams of fortune and fame by demanding they first conduct a field study. She wants to learn more about the “desolate, desertlike” planet and its history of colonization, including a cult that vanished 50 years ago. Lévai skillfully builds tension between the sisters as they explore a setting that oozes with atmosphere and, eventually, discover the bizarre force at the garden’s root. There’s plenty here to hold sci-fi readers’ interest. (May)