Godfall

Saw this randomly on tiktok (or was it blue sky?) which is not the most credible recommendation, I looked on Amazon but it only had 100 and change reviews, however it had a Ron Howard endorsement on the cover and that was good enough for me. Sweetgrass, Nebraska is a remote, small town with population 500 and then comes the predicted meteor earth collision extinction level panic. The meteor turns out to be a mile long sculpture of a humanoid which is discovered, when at the last second after entering the atmosphere, mysteriously hits the brakes and delicately lands a mile from Sweetgrass. Cut to two years later after the military has built a fence around the landing site, nicknamed gulliver, along with a large facility for spies, scientists etc. and several hundred thousand curious people have moved into the town. Our protagonist, David, is the sheriff from before gulliver landed, a newly minted apparent serial killer has just killed David’s cousin nearly a brother, but FBI immediately takes over the murder investigation.

That should sound like the premise for a fun novel… and it is, in fact, a fun, fast beach read. Nitpicks: I wish that the cover didn’t look like it was generated by AI in 30 seconds, I think the story ended a little too generically. But hey, its a first novel.