Murder follows Mallory Viridian. Elementary school, college, day jobs, parties: If she’s there, someone is likely to die.
And if they die, she’ll be uncannily drawn to the mystery of who did it, much to the ire and skepticism of law enforcement.
She wanted to get away from the death, so she became one of the first humans on the alien space station Eternity. There she was an oddity among the aliens, a member of the one known species that doesn’t form beneficial symbiotic relationships with other aliens.
The Sundry, hive-minded wasps, paid her to let them poke and prod her, while she struck up friendships with the rock-like Gneiss. With the only other human on board being a surly ambassador from Earth, she was able to enjoy a stretch of time with no one dying.
Except, this isn’t the sort of book where people don’t die.
Murder, She Sussed
Mur Lafferty‘s Station Eternity (Book 1 of the Midsolar Murders series) is a cozy murder novel in space, with the set-up of Murder, She Wrote but with the geeky awareness that knows what would happen if someone actually kept showing up at the center of a murder investigation.
It plays with the tropes of series like Murder, She Wrote, but with a self-aware main character who realizes that being followed by murder (and then intellectually compelled to solve said murder) isn’t normal.
Lafferty interweaves flashbacks that allow the story and its characters to loop in upon themselves, knitting the threads that logically lead to the book’s big reveal. It’s definitely a cozy read – great for a winter afternoon or a day at the beach – but that coziness falls away in the final third of the book as the plot accelerates.
It’s a good read, and definitely worth of a sequel. That book, Chaos Terminal (Amazon), is out now and is part of Nuketown’s Summer 2024 reading list.
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Cover art for Station Eternity. Credit: Penguin/Random House