Customer Reviews

Under a Killing Moon: A Tex Murphy Novel (Tex Murphy Series)

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Tex Murphy, the San Francisco P.I. born a hundred years too late returns in his third case. Tex is hired to find a statuette for a woman named Countess Reiner, but after he gets it, he quickly loses it (With a couple blows to the head) and the place that Countess Reiner lived in has been deserted. Tex doesn't like getting hit over the head, or losing a paycheck, so Tex manages to stumble into a case too big for him and way over his head in a story that will leave you wowed and laughing. This is Tex Murphy's third adventure, before this there were two games that never became books: Mean Streets and Martian Memmorandum. If you're a Tex Murphy fan, or a mystery fan, this is a great book.

Not as exciting or overwhelming as "The Pandora Directive", it still packs a powerful punch of nostalgia and holds up it's name in a rare genre of writing.

Having read Aaron Conners' novelization of THE PANDORA DIRECTIVE, I felt compelled to go out and get my hands on his next novel, UNDER A KILLING MOON.

One thing I really liked about PANDORA was that it didn't follow the game slavically--it was different in many ways. I get the feeling that, with MOON, Conners tried going even a step further--and actually write a novel that wasn't a *real* novelization, but more based on the basic storyline.

MOON-the novel differs vastly from MOON-the game (which, coincidentally, is one of my alltime favorite games), in more ways than I care to mention. If you thought Lucia Pernell's sudden sex change in PANDORA was a mite strange, just try and grab a hold of MOON--the novel starts in what would be the game's third chapter!!

While I found this to be a good approach in PANDORA, I found it a little confusing and possibly a bit irritating to read what looks like a stressed attempt to do the same thing done in PANDORA--only twice better. Conners seems to want to outdo himself by taking all the things that were good about PANDORA and doubling it in MOON. For instance, PANDORA featured one or two vivid descriptions of food (how it tasted, the flavors, etc.). MOON does the same, although there's more than five of them.

This does not constitute a bad novel, though, mind you. MOON is an overall pleasure to read, and--considering that a game like MOON, in its core form, is very unsuitable for novelization (how would *you* describe Rook's pawn shop robbery without making the whole thing look like a walkthru for the game?)--Conners pulls it off very well. The new twists to the plot are very imaginitive, and you get the sensation that this was what the cancelled silver screen project was going to look like.

The novel is very suitable, not only for fans of the game, but also for newcomers. Even if you haven't been acquainted with Tex Murphy via the computer monitor, you'll still be able to enjoy this book without losing any overall mood effect.