I received this book for free from Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Murder by Memory by Olivia WaitePublished by Tor Publishing Group on March 18, 2025
Genres: Fiction / Romance / LGBTQ+ / Lesbian, Fiction / Science Fiction / Crime & Mystery, Fiction / Science Fiction / Space Exploration
Pages: 112
Format: eARC, eBook
Source: Publisher
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Buy on BookshopBecky Chambers meets Miss Marple in this sci-fi ode to the cozy mystery, helmed by a no-nonsense formidable auntie of a detective
A mind is a terrible thing to erase...
Welcome to the HMS Fairweather, Her Majesty's most luxurious interstellar passenger liner! Room and board are included, new bodies are graciously provided upon request, and should you desire a rest between lifetimes, your mind shall be most carefully preserved in glass in the Library, shielded from every danger.
Near the topmost deck of an interstellar generation ship, Dorothy Gentleman wakes up in a body that isn’t hers—just as someone else is found murdered. As one of the ship’s detectives, Dorothy usually delights in unraveling the schemes on board the Fairweather, but when she finds that someone is not only killing bodies but purposefully deleting minds from the Library, she realizes something even more sinister is afoot.
Dorothy suspects her misfortune is partly the fault of her feckless nephew Ruthie who, despite his brilliance as a programmer, leaves chaos in his cheerful wake. Or perhaps the sultry yarn store proprietor—and ex-girlfriend of the body Dorothy is currently inhabiting—knows more than she’s letting on. Whatever it is, Dorothy intends to solve this case. Because someone has done the impossible and found a way to make murder on the Fairweather a very permanent state indeed. A mastermind may be at work—and if so, they’ve had three hundred years to perfect their schemes...
Told through Dorothy’s delightfully shrewd POV, this novella is an ode to the cozy mystery taken to the stars with a fresh new sci-fi take. Perfect for fans of the plot-twisty narratives of Dorothy Sayers and Ann Leckie, this well-paced story will leave readers captivated and hungry for the series’s next installment.
Can a murder mystery even BE cozy? Is that really a thing? I wouldn’t have sought this book out on my own, but the publisher reached out to me to see if I’d like to read it and the blurb caught me. A cozy murder mystery in space? I’ve been all about sci-fi lately, so I decided sure, I’ll read this.
This is a surprisingly twisty story for such a short one. This book is a novella and the metadata provided by the publisher says it’s 112 pages. The author wastes no time explaining more than the reader needs to know. Dorothy Gentleman is a detective. She is on a space ship. Her mind has been sleeping for some time and she has found herself in someone else’s body because of an emergency.
There has been a murder.
Where is the ship going? Not important; we don’t know. Why did it leave Earth? Also not important. What is important is that the ship is essentially a mini-city in which its inhabitants live out their many lives and go about their business. When their generated fleshy body dies, their mind is stored in a Book in the Library. The Book isn’t a book as we’d think of it, but more of a glass case that holds the mind’s memories. A resident can take a break and stay in the Library, essentially sleeping, or they can wait the requisite two days for a new flesh bag to be generated by the ship and return to their business.
Of course, anyone who has lived through any or all of cloud saves, Blu-Rays, DVDs, CDs, VHS and cassette tapes knows that data can also be destroyed. What happens when it does? Is it murder if you kill a body when the mind still exists? Is it still murder if you destroy the mind or is it something bigger? Something worse?
And what reason does a person have for murder when all their needs are being met?
If you want answers to these, and other questions, you’ll be able to pick up this short and deadly little tale on March 18, 2025.
