Becky 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’ next installment.

Dorothy wakes up in a body that is not hers. The waking up is not unusual, she is a passenger on a space ship on a centuries long voyage, but normally people wake up in a newer version of their old body. People’s memories are kept downloaded in their “book” kept in the ships library and when one dies the memories are downloaded into a new version of that person’s body. But Dorothy was not ready to wake up, much less in someone else’s body, but she is a ship’s detective and there has been both a murder and, worse, books in the library have been destroyed so the dead woman cannot be revived. Dorothy must solve the murder while her nephew figures out how to keep more “books” from being destroyed in the future.

This is a really quick read - Kindle says a bit over an hour - so more than a short story but not quite a novella. The premise is interesting. A space ship from earth on its way to somewhere on a voyage already into its third century. Rather than people in cryosleep a method of preserving memories and then reinstalling them into a new (cloned?) body when the old one wears out is standard, basically no one really dies. With more or less ten thousand residents the ship is a thriving civilization and the characters we do meet, Dorothy, her nephew Ruthie and his boyfriend/partner John, are all interesting people we want to know more about. 

I really liked the whole premise of this story and fervently hope we will see more of Dorothy and the other passengers. Recommended ~~ Stephanie L Bannon

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