Becky Chambers meets Miss Marple in the second entry of this cozy sci-fi mystery series, helmed by a formidable no-nonsense auntie of a detective
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.
A wild baby appears! Dorothy Gentleman, ship detective, is put to the test once again when an infant is mysteriously left on her nephew's doorstep. Fertility is supposed to be on pause during the Fairweather’s journey across the stars—but humans have a way of breaking any rule you set them. Who produced this child, and why did they then abandon him? And as her nephew and his partner get more and more attached, how can Dorothy prevent her colleague and rival detective, Leloup, a stickler for law and order, from classifying the baby as a stowaway or a piece of luggage?
Told through Dorothy’s delightfully shrewd POV, this novella series 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 next installment.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

My Review:

This follow-up to last year’s delightful Murder by Memory is, well, a bit more grounded than that series opener. That grounding being more than a bit ironic, as ship’s detective Dorothy Gentleman, along with the HMS Fairweather, the ship that she is one of the detectives both for and on, is three centuries out from Earth, headed for an unknown planet that still seems to be nowhere in sight.

They’ll get there – eventually. Which is part of both the plot and the puzzle in this second entry in the series.

Ferry, as Dorothy calls the ship, is on a several (or perhaps many) centuries long voyage to seed a human colony far, far away from an Earth that was in crisis when they all left. But it is not traveling at faster-than-light speed, it’s not a sleeper ship and it’s explicitly not a generation ship.

Or at least it’s not supposed to be a generation ship – and thereby hangs this particular tale.

Because someone has left an infant on the doorstep of Dorothy’s nephew Rutherford’s apartment. On a ship that is a completely enclosed environment, that never lands and has no possibility of visitors. A ship where every single passenger boarded as an adult, and whose reproductive systems were put in a kind of medical stasis intended to last through the entire voyage no matter how many times the passenger is re-embodied from their memory book.

The child should not exist. It should not be possible for it to exist. But there it sits. And screams. And very, very definitely poops.

There’s a literal tiny mystery here, as Dorothy is forced to question whether someone has found a way around the fertility block or whether it just broke down naturally. If the former, who? If the latter, is the block in danger of breaking down all over the place? It’s an important question, because there simply isn’t housing for the population explosion that would inevitably follow.

But solving the medical questions is easy. OTOH, solving the political questions are hard. Because that baby, less than six months old, doesn’t legally exist aboard ship. There are no provisions for a new citizen to be born until after the Ferry reaches their new home planet.

Someone is responsible for the baby’s creation – and more importantly, for hiding the baby’s existence for nearly six months. The baby can’t be blamed for being, effectively, a stowaway, but someone can.

Secondly, someone needs to be responsible for the baby himself, now that he exists. And someone has to protect his rights to BE a citizen of their community, with all the rights, privileges and responsibilities that entails – even if Dorothy Gentleman has to bring a whole class of case law forward in order to make that happen.

Which she will. Because her nephew and his husband have already taken little Peregrine into their hearts, and they’re not letting go. So neither is she.

Escape Rating A-: Nobody’s Baby is every bit as much twisty mystery fun as Murder by Memory. And that’s true even though there’s no actual murder involved in either book – which is part of the science fictional setting of this series.

People don’t exactly die on Ferry. They get ‘mostly dead’ but they really do get better, because death is built into the entire equation of life aboard the Fairweather. Their bodies die. Well, the bodies they are currently inhabiting die. But their consciousness, including all their memories, is regularly uploaded to their ‘memory books’, which are then downloaded into their new bodies each time they choose to be re-embodied.

That process is part of both stories in the series, as in each case someone’s body is murdered but their memory books have not been recently updated, leaving a gap in their memories that results in heartbreak all around. In this particular case, the mother of little Peregrine was kept isolated so that her memory book did not include her pregnancy or the birth of her child, while someone nefarious was doing their damndest to wipe out her memory of a life that her ‘killer’ wanted erased for reasons of their own.

So there both is and isn’t a murder case, and it does have important consequences but not terrible consequences. AND it asks some really interesting questions about do-overs in life along the way.

But the real consequences of the story all lie in the bassinet of little Peregrine. He exists, but he shouldn’t. One of Dorothy’s colleagues wants to apply the current law to the baby, making Peregrine either a stowaway or property. Both, of course, have negative consequences, but we’ve all worked with people for whom the rules and regulations are more important than the real world consequences as they pertain to other people. Or other potentially ‘not people’ as might be little Peregrine’s fate if the ‘rules lawyer’ gets their ‘letter of the law’ way.

So it’s that case, Dorothy’s fight for Peregrine’s rights to be, not just a person but a citizen just like everyone else, that make up the heart and soul of the story. That opening her heart to little Peregrine allows Dorothy to open her own as well, gave this story a lovely ending, and very apropos – if you squint just a bit – for the holiday season in which I read it.

I like Dorothy’s wryly intelligent first person perspective on life aboard the Ferry, and it’s fascinating to see the whole scene fleshed out a bit more in this second book. But I still want more, so I’m hoping that Dorothy will be back this time next year!

A Memory Called Empire meets Miss Marple in this cozy, spaceborne mystery, helmed by a no-nonsense formidable auntie of a detective.
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…

My Review:

Some versions of the opening line for the blurb are way, way off. A Memory Called Empire meets Miss Marple is so far off as to be misleading. (The Becky Chambers version of the blurb is somewhat better.) I’m going to do my damndest to correct that misdirection as Murder By Memory is just a terrific cozy mystery that just so happens to be set on a spaceship.

Although that’s misleading too. The HMS Fairweather is more like a space-liner. Or, really, like that cruise line that almost-but-didn’t-quite manage to launch, the one where people were intended to move in and live on the cruise ship as it traveled around the world.

The HMS Fairweather is a lot like that Life at Sea concept, except that it really did launch and its intended journey is for considerably longer than three years. It seems like it’s been traveling for more than three centuries when this story takes place – with no end in sight.

It isn’t a generation ship and it doesn’t seem to have a destination. It’s an endless journey – and an endless life. The passengers do age and eventually die – well, at least their bodies do. Their consciousness gets uploaded and downloaded from one body to another – and life goes on.

The ship is a world unto itself, a surprisingly large and fascinating one. But humans are gonna human, even in the vastness of space, and that’s where Detective Dorothy Gentleman comes in.

Literally, as her sleeping consciousness gets dropped into someone else’s body, in the middle of the ship’s night, while all the passengers and crew – except for Dorothy and this one intrepid and/or intriguing individual who is for some reason out and about while everyone else is tucked away safe and sound in their quarters.

Except, of course, for the other person who is not where they should be, the woman whose sudden death triggered Dorothy’s own return from the sleep between lifetimes. Leaving Dorothy with a job to do and a problem to solve while wondering exactly how unethical it is to borrow someone else’s body after they’ve just used it to commit murder.

Escape Rating A-: This is one of those stories where my one and only complaint is that I really, really, REALLY wish it had been longer. Because what we got was a whole lot of cozy, murderous fun and Dorothy Gentleman is a marvelous take on the lone detective chasing clues and unraveling puzzles in the middle of the long, dark night.

While I wouldn’t have gone within a parsec of the blurb’s description of Marple meets Teixcalaan, I absolutely would describe it as a combination of two books, the SF mystery plot of Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Spare Man combined with the secrets within secrets of life aboard a spacefaring cruise ship of Floating Hotel by Grace Curtis. Not that The Spare Man isn’t also set on a space cruise, but that ship doesn’t have the same vibe that living aboard the ship has in Floating Hotel and Murder by Memory.

So much of A Memory Called Empire is wrapped up in the high-stakes, deeply corruptive, politics of Teixcalaan and its imperial history and ambitions that it just doesn’t feel like any kind of match for Murder by Memory, which is, in spite of the murder, much lighter and frothier. (If the Chambers comparison is to her Wayfarers series and The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, well, that’s somewhere in the virtually towering TBR pile and I haven’t gotten there yet.)

Dorothy Gentleman is good at her job – and it’s fun to watch her work. That she is working from within the body of her primary suspect adds just the right touch of grounding in the SFnal setting to make the whole thing just that much better AND more convoluted at the same time.

Because the solution to this mystery is a grand case of following the money. It’s just that the money that Dorothy is following has been both stolen and hidden in ways that are only possible in SF even though the motive is one of the oldest and most human – greed. While the final piece of evidence is found in the most science fictional way possible.

Dorothy herself starts out as just a touch noir – as she has been unlucky in love and seems determined to conduct her investigation the same way she intends to conduct her life – alone. That she is surprised by both the support of her new and remaining family AND that love might just have found her again made the story end on a high and hopeful note.

I’m looking forward to reading more of Dorothy’s adventures aboard the Fairweather. The setting is already delightful, and more time will just add more delicious layers. Dorothy herself is a fascinating character, someone who has lived a long life and turned her nosy nature to good use. That we’re inside her head for this story, hearing her true – and often wry and witty – thoughts as she works her way through the mystery made the whole thing just that much better and absolutely worth a read.