I first met Jeff Rake at San Diego Comic Con the summer before his show Manifest premiered, so my ears perked up when I heard he was writing a book. I did my darndest to get a ticket to the ARC giveaway at New York Comic Con, and came home with an early copy. I didn’t feel like digging it out of my shelves, so when it hit the Pengiun Random House Audio review platform, I downloaded it and hit play.

Detour [Buy Bookshop Amazon LibroFM] starts by giving us various perspectives from people preparing to go into space. They are heading to Saturn’s moon, Titan, and three members of this team are not astronauts. They are just normal people selected to join the mission and make a whole lot of money along the way.

The book’s blurb is A space shuttle flight crew discovers that the Earth they’ve returned to is not the home they left behind in this emotional, mind-bending thriller.” But here’s the thing… that doesn’t happen until about 80% into the book. Like, I literally looked back at the blurb about halfway to make sure I was reading the correct book. So, first of all, I think this blurb does a major disservice to the reader and I’m kinda annoyed by it.

The other thing that annoys me is that this kinda makes Jeff Rake look like a one-trick pony. If you’ve seen Manifest, then this is all going to sound very familiar to you. Basically, just take the show and instead of people on a flight coming back five years later, it’s astronauts coming home to a slightly different reality. This even has the same vibes of ‘survivors must band together’, ‘the government might be in on it’, ‘don’t talk about it or else,’ and ‘ope, now we’re all on the run’. Heck, they even have the abrupt ending, like when the show got canceled and we didn’t know if we’d get to see the ending. (Thank you, Netflix, for not leaving us hanging.)

As to the audiobook narration, I don’t really remember much about it. I was too annoyed at all the similarities in the story itself to register an opinion on the narrators’ performance. My bad.

In my opinion, if you’ve seen Manifest, you can skip this book entirely because you’ve already seen it. If you haven’t watched the show, then you’ll probably enjoy this, especially if you like sci-fi and spy thrillers.

Overall, I’m a bit disappointed.