A Toaster on Mars by Darrell Pitt (review)

If you’re going to be stuck with a new partner in the Planetary Bureau of Investigation, Nicki’s a fantastic one; she’s also patient about repeatedly explaining that she is a cyborg, not a robot. Blake, to whom she is assigned, is a hard-bitten cop underwhelmed by his new comrade, but when his daughter is kidnapped by a bad guy he has been tracking for years, he relinquishes his prejudices and just wants help. Now the brand new coworker he didn’t trust a day ago and his ex-wife are his only allies as he tries to save his daughter. A jaded (some might say washed up), hardened investigator with a twelve-year-old is an unusual narrator for a YA tale, but Australian author Pitt pulls it off with aplomb; since Blake stopped maturing right around late adolescence, there’s an extra implicit connection. The snarky, egotistical comments of Zeeb, the alien who is being forced to edit this book as income are funny but often disrupt the flow of the novel; the book is at its most effective when focusing on Blake and the brilliant Nicki, whose literal interpretation of the world makes for clever moments of sarcasm gone wrong in their exchanges. It’s not quite Douglas Adams amounts of interstellar wonkiness, but given the fact that there’s a sentient Swiss cheese sandwich threatening their lives at one point, it comes close.