Moon Shadows

Moon Shadows is a near-future techno-thriller about a run of American lunar landers that fail during descent, each one looking like an accident. Investigative journalist Alex Carter sets out to prove the failures are not accidents, while engineer Evelyn Pierce, blamed for one of the crashes, works from inside her company to make sure the next lander survives. The story runs from 2035 to 2037, between New York, Paris, Beijing and lunar orbit.

Moon Shadows is a near-future techno-thriller that also sits on the hard science fiction and espionage shelves. The plot is an investigation, not a space adventure: most of the book happens in newsrooms, engineering labs, boardrooms and tracking stations, and the tension comes from evidence, deadlines and launch windows, not from gunfights.

Yes, in the sense readers usually mean. There's no faster-than-light travel, no aliens, no superintelligent AI. The lunar landers, the navigation systems they depend on and the ways they fail are all extrapolated from current programs about a decade forward. I'm an aerospace engineer, and I wanted the engineering in Moon Shadows to hold up for readers who work in the field.

No. Everything in Moon Shadows is human-made, including the threat. The book is closer to a political and engineering thriller than to first-contact science fiction.

A little, and it's slow. Moon Shadows has a restrained, secondary thread between Alex Carter and a French journalist he starts out competing with. There are no sex scenes, on or off the page. Readers looking for a romance subplot will find a hint of one; readers who'd rather not have one won't find it getting in the way.

Moon Shadows has two main points of view. Alex Carter, an investigative reporter at the New York Ledger, carries about half the book: a journalist with one career-ending mistake behind him and a teenage daughter he's trying to reconnect with. Dr. Evelyn Pierce, a navigation engineer at the lander's manufacturer, carries most of the rest. A few chapters are told from the other side of the conflict.

Readers who like Michael Crichton's procedural thrillers, Andy Weir's engineering rigour or Daniel Suarez's near-future tech, and who enjoy watching competent people build a case. Moon Shadows suits readers who prefer tension from evidence and deadlines over action set pieces, and who like a thriller where the institutions (newsrooms, corporations, governments) are as much a part of the story as the characters.

Readers looking for space combat, astronauts in danger or fast action-hero pacing. Moon Shadows is a deliberate, detail-rich investigation of about 125,000 words, and much of it happens at desks, in labs and on phone calls. There are no crewed missions at risk and no firefights.

Moon Shadows is closest to Michael Crichton's Airframe: another investigation into why a machine failed when it shouldn't have, moved to the Moon. Readers of Daniel Suarez's Delta-v will recognise the near-future space industry, and readers of Andy Weir's The Martian the engineering detail, though Moon Shadows is an ensemble investigation rather than a survival story. On screen, think For All Mankind crossed with All the President's Men.

Readers on Amazon most often mention three things: the orbital mechanics and engineering feel real without turning into jargon; the investigation builds tension through evidence rather than action; and Alex Carter's relationship with his teenage daughter gives Moon Shadows more heart than they expected from a techno-thriller. The most common reservation is pace: it's a steady, detail-rich build, not a fast action read, and a few readers found the switches between viewpoints took some getting used to.

Moon Shadows is written for adults but contains nothing most parents would object to for readers around 14 and up: no sex, no gore, mild language, and no on-page deaths. What makes it an adult read is the density: legal, corporate, geopolitical and technical detail at an investigative pace. One of the main threads follows a sixteen-year-old, which gives younger readers a way in.

Yes, all mild: threats and intimidation, surveillance, a corporate cover-up, a strained father–daughter relationship and mild profanity. The full list is under Content notes, below.

Yes. Moon Shadows is complete in itself: the main story resolves, with no cliffhanger. It's the first Alex Carter investigation, and later books follow Alex into new cases, but each one can be read on its own.

No. Close Approach is a free standalone novella with its own cast and story, and it can be read before or after Moon Shadows, or not at all. It's a good one-evening sample of how I write if you want to try before you buy.

Any order. Close Approach (free novella) and Moon Shadows (novel) don't depend on each other. The First Percent, the next Alex Carter investigation, is also written to stand alone. If you want a recommendation: Moon Shadows first.

About 125,000 words, a full-length novel: a prologue and 40 chapters. The Moon Shadows paperback runs to 422 pages.

Ebook, paperback and hardcover, published 19 August 2026.

Yes. The Moon Shadows ebook is enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, so subscribers can read it at no extra cost.

Not yet. An Italian edition of Moon Shadows is in preparation.

The navigation systems, lander descent profiles, orbital tracking and treaty frameworks in Moon Shadows are all grounded in real programs and published research. The novel's weapon is built from techniques that exist today in other forms. Where the book extrapolates, it goes about ten years forward from current hardware, not into speculative physics.

The idea came from the news. Between 2023 and 2025, several landers failed on the Moon: some crashed, others tipped over on touchdown. Space is hard, and that's a fact. But those headlines got me thinking: what if the failures weren't down to bad design or bad luck? What if someone had arranged them in secret, to protect a national interest? That was the seed of Moon Shadows.

I chose a journalist as the protagonist so readers would follow the story from a point of view close to their own: someone outside the industry, asking the questions they would ask. Beside him I put a strong engineer as co-protagonist, to keep the technical side at the centre and to explain the more complex parts through someone who truly understands them.

I'm an Italian aerospace engineer, and I live in Rome. Moon Shadows is my first novel. I write near-future thrillers about people solving hard problems, anchored in real science and researched engineering.