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Missing Man is the first Joshua Brock novel from Michael Cassutt, the SF writer with the actual space-program background, and it is the kind of procedural that the SF form rarely manages. Joshua Brock is a former NASA astronaut now working as a mishap investigator when a former colleague disappears under circumstances that begin reaching back to a fatal Skylab accident decades earlier.
Cassutt's strength in Missing Man is the institutional knowledge. The Johnson Space Center geography, the contemporary US space-program politics, and the specific personality dynamics of the astronaut corps are rendered with the kind of authority that comes from working knowledge. Fans of Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary or Mary Robinette Kowal's Lady Astronaut series will recognize the careful space-procedural register.
The mystery involves both the present-day disappearance and the historical Skylab accident, and the two threads converge with appropriate weight.
Four stars. A serious SF procedural with genuine specialist knowledge. Recommended for readers who like their space fiction insider-rendered. The Missing Man Michael Cassutt entry is one of the most underread SF debuts of the early 2000s.
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