Mur Lafferty

A book club pick :)

What a mess!

I haven’t read that many boring mysteries, but this one takes top spot.

I liked Six Wakes, so I jumped at the chance to read a “murder on a space station” book by the same author. It started off promisingly enough:

Murders just seem to happen around Mallory Viridian. She also happens to solve them.
The book was doing excellent things with ”murders always happen when the famous detective appears” trope, turning it on its head.
”Romance was out of the show more question; if someone dated Mallory, then someone close to them would die. Without fail.” Mallory hides from people and is very lonely. She has sought refuge on a sentient space station full of aliens, hoping this will stop her “curse”. These first few chapters were fun.

Suddenly, a shuttle full of humans is on its way. Mallory runs around in panic. There is a murder, of course. In fact, there are several. Then I watched the book crash and burn.

There was a never-ending parade of new POV characters and their back stories, as we were jumping back and forth in time. Sometimes we jumped several times per chapter. The stories piled up. Murder mystery, what murder mystery? Is Mallory doing any detective stuff? Nope.

Does one of my most hated stupid plot devices make an appearance? Indeed. People have secrets, and they tell each other that they are keeping secrets. ”I can’t tell you right now. I can’t explain, I am sorry.” ”I’ll tell you everything, but now is not the time.” This happens more than once. This is the sound of me rocking back and forth.

The characters’ motivations and behaviour often made zero sense. Well, of course they didn’t, they were there for plot reasons. Wait a minute… Plot, hello, where did you go? Where are you? Did you drown in the swamp this book turned into?

There are also things like ”Mallory remembered that the Gneiss* usually preferred to talk to one another via vibrations…” and “oh, by the way, I am a Gneiss princess!” and “oh, by the way, we aliens x have this thing we can do”. World building, what world building? What is show, don’t tell? This is the sound of me trying not to hit my head against the wall.

*Gneiss are sentients made of rock. They would have been better off in a different book.

Dear book gods, why was this novel so long? 457 pages! It desperately needed tightening up. It needed to be at least a hundred pages shorter.

I confess that I was hate reading for most of the book. The last chapters got more interesting and had some cool moments, but it was too little, too late.

I will need to be very, very careful in choosing my next read. Just sayin’. show less

Oh I LOVED this, it was an absolutely chewy mystery in an incredibly cool sci-fi, humans-encountering-extraterrestrial-life scenario, with just the right amount of humor. The set-up—a woman who believes, due to mountains of evidence, that her presence literally attracts murderers, or even causes other people to murder each other, has run away to a space station with an exceedingly low human population—is superb. It's just a page-turning, engrossing, fantastic book, good for fans of show more Martha Wells and Murderbot, Daniel O'Malley, or Becky Chambers but with crime & mystery! Sign me up for any future entries in this series, I am absolutely there. show less

As they say down here in the Old North State, “Always love me some Mur Lafferty.” And not just because she is a local author and a fan of the Durham Bulls.

The Midsolar Murders series continues to be as much fun as ever. Queen Tina is back with her belly full of Cuckoos, and Mrs. Brown is still in charge. Adrian has some artificial eyes, and, oh yes, Mallory has a sentient toddler spaceship to raise.

Finally, what could be more fun for a mystery writer than to kill off a literary agent? show more To be fair, Lafferty gives hearty praise to her literary agent—so no roman a clef. show less

Zoe Norris narrowly escaped a bad job and a bad relationship in Raleigh and moved back to New York City, where she grew up. But now she is completely desperate for a job - any job. Imagine her good luck when she stops in a creepy hole-in-the-wall bookstore and sees a help-wanted notice for a guidebook company. Zoe persistently applies for the job, despite repeatedly being told that it is "not for people like her". After wrangling a meeting with the president, she discovers the job is show more actually editing a city guide for monsters - vampires, zombies, dragons, golems, deities, etc. - but they prefer to be called coterie. They end up hiring her, figuring it will be useful to have a human on staff. Plus, unlike everyone else who works there, she has actual experience writing a guidebook. Zoe has a sometimes grand, sometimes dangerous time learning about her "interesting" coworkers' lives and their favorite places in the City. Soon, however, strange happenings and signs begin pointing to some impending disaster in which Zoe is more involved than she could have imagined.

The world-building here is amazing. The plot was perfectly good, but the world-building! The coterie New York City is fully of interesting details from a maze of tunnels under the city built by rats to the New York Department of Public Works which, along with fixing sewer lines, maintains the delicate balance between humans and coterie in the city. In between chapters is a paragraph excerpt from the guidebook that is eventually written, detailing a coterie-friendly restaurant or coterie-related history of Central Park. The writing is good, and there's just the perfect amount of humor that doesn't overshadow the danger Zoe sometimes finds herself in. I loved all the characters, from Morgen the water sprite and Fanny the fertility goddess to John the sometimes-sexy incubus and Benjamin Rosenberg the zoetist. Highly recommended if you like the supernatural - especially with a dash of humor. show less