Nobody's Baby (Dorothy Gentleman, #2) by Olivia Waite Format: eARC
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, science fiction, science fiction mystery
Series: Dorothy Gentleman #2
Pages: 144
Published by Tordotcom on March 10, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
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!
Murder by Memory (Dorothy Gentleman, #1) by 
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