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…

IN A NUTSHELL
‘Murder By Memory ‘ was a clever, entertaining, well-written novella that created a whole new world aboard the Fairweather an interstellar generation ship and solved a crime unique to that environment while introducing a ship’s detective I hope to see more of soon.

‘Murder By Memory‘ is only 100 pages long but Oliviai Waite packs a lot into it and never made me feel that I was having data thrust upon me. She opens with ship’s detective, Dorothy Gentleman, waking in a stalled lift during a magnetic storm, in a body that is not her own. After that, things get stranger and more complicated.

I liked the calm way that Dorothy assess her situation and eventually discovers and solves the crime that created it. I was comfortable inside her head. As I’d expect from a ship’s detective, she’s observant, suspicious and relentless in her desire to know what really happened and who was responsible. She’s also as kind as her role allows, shows empathy for others and is haunted by a recent loss of her own. I liked that she’s as curious about people as she is about solving puzzles.

The worldbuilding was deftly done. I quickly got a feel the set-up of this generation ship on which people will live for a millennium, using a succession of bodies updated from a single ‘book’ that stores their memories and personalities. The characters were exotic but engaging. Fairweather is full of all kinds of interesting people, although CIS white males seem to be very much a minority. The crime was ingenious. I even liked the AI running the ship, especially as the magnetic storm had made it cheerfully tipsy when we first met.

Both Dorothy Gentlemen and the Fairweather offer a wealth of opportunities for future stories. I’m looking forward to reading them.

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