Chaos Terminal is Mur Lafferty’s follow-up to Station Eternity. Like the previous book in the Midsolar Murders series, Chaos Terminal features Mallory Viridian, a human with a penchant for solving murders.
Like a sci-fi Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote, murders tend to happen around Mallory. Or she tends to be attracted to where murders will happen. Or both. Once the bodies start dropping, Mallory’s sixth sense kicks in to help her intuitively assemble the clues she needs to solve the crime.
No one got suspicious when – inevitably – someone dropped dead (usually by murder) when Jessica Fletcher came to town. Mallory wasn’t so lucky, and fled to Station Eternity to avoid the drama and suspicion that came from her life on Earth.
This time around, Malllory’s dealing with the months-long aftershocks of being stung by one of the Sundry, intelligent, hive mind insects that provide intelligence gathering and reporting aboard Eternity. While she struggles to recover from the flu-like symptoms, a research delegation arrives from Earth. They include a new human ambassador for the station, a basketball coach turned gossip writer trying to make it big on a galactic scale, the police investigator who’d once made Mallory’s life miserably, and researchers from a North Carolina university … who turn out to be her childhood friends.
Murder and Sci-Fi
[SPOILERS STATION ETERNITY … go read the book!]
At the conclusion of Station Eternity, Mallory learned the Sundry were responsible for her uncanny ability to appear in the vicinity of a soon-to-happen or the-body-is-still-cooling murder. The alien insects were secretly on Earth for years before formal first contact, and stung Mallory as a child.
That subconsciously connected her to the hive mind, and her own brain used it to find the lines that lead to murder. In Book 2, Mallory needs to come to terms with this ability and try to figure out if her murder-solving skills were just an alien fluke, or if she could actually investigate the murders without the hivemind whispering to her brain.
My friends and I have described the Midsolar Murders as a cozy murder mystery in space, and it’s still a good description of Book 2. That said, while murder is still at the center of the Chaos Terminal, Lafferty kicks things up several notches on the sci-fi front.
There’s the obligatory human murder, but there are strange happenings on Eternity itself. The station’s human steward/host is called away for training on a distant planet, and in their absence, the station stops responding to queries from its alien residents, or response with cryptic “everything’s fine” when things are clearly not fine.
The biology of the Sundry plays a major role in the story, as does a growing intergalactic incident involving the Nice, an alien species comprised of living rock. To delve too deeply into the plot is to ruin the fun, and this book is a hell of a lot of fun. Lafferty does a good job of weaving the weird coincidences into satisfying reveals, and while this book has a touch more high school drama to it, that drama works.
It’s an excellent vacation or beach read, and a worthwhile addition to your own summer reading list.
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Cover art for Chaos Terminal. Credit: Penguin Random House