Synopsis:
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.
Review:
Last month I decided to check out the first book in Olivia Waite’s new cozy scifi whodunit series, Murder by Memory, enjoying the shenanigans that can take place on an ark ship in deep space hundreds of years from Earth yet still hundreds of years away from their eventual destination. Our protagonist, Dorothy Gentleman, is a detective on the HMS Fairweather and has to use her skills of deduction to solve mysteries that wouldn’t even be conceivable on Earth and are in uncharted territory in the comfort of the Fairweather. So, when I had the chance to read the follow-up, Nobody’s Baby, I gladly signed up for the scifi novella.
In Nobody’s Baby, Waite expands on the characters we were introduced to in Murder by Memory, and again we are treated to a conundrum only possible in the scifi world of the Fairweather. Due to the nature of their voyage across the stars, everyone on board the ship is an adult. When their lives are over, they are given a new body and they start over again with their memories of their old life (lives?) intact. So, when a baby shows up on Dorthy’s nephew’s doorstep, it’s a medical mystery that leads down a rabbit hole of other mysteries.
Since death is often not final onboard the Fairweather, the “murder” aspect takes on a lighter tone than what you might be used to from a murder mystery, but there is still plenty of fun to be had as Dorothy goes about figuring out where the baby came from and what to do from there.
The story is a good amount of fun, but as a novella, there aren’t quite as many twists as turns as you might expect from a good whodunit. The red herrings are more pink in color and the “killer” is identified a little quicker than you might hope. But the cozy nature of the book keeps the pace nice and easy with little in terms of stakes. As for Nobody’s Baby, a significant chunk of the later part of this one turned into ponderings on the classification of what the baby is on a ship full of adults — what rights do they have and not have, are they deemed equal to everyone else, and who will care for the child? The legal questions almost overshadow the mysteries in the climax of this short read.
Overall, I had a decent time and would gladly sign up for another few days aboard the Fairweather, chilling with Detective Dorothy Gentlemen. One of the things I’ve come to enjoy about this series is the questions about what it means to be human when you are hundreds of light years away from Earth and lifespans far exceed what they would be thanks to the advanced technology of their ship. How does murder even work? What kind of crimes exist when you’re locked in a ship with a few thousand humans and what does punishment look like for committing those crimes? Olivia Waite has fun positing those questions and more and I look forward to more of that in future installments.
As for the audiobook, Blair Baker did more than a fine job with it. For female voices she’s excellent and in particular she shines with the character of Dorothy Gentlemen. She doesn’t have a ton of audiobook credits to her name, but I imagine we’ll be seeing a lot more books narrated by her in the near future.
Thank you to Macmillan Audio for providing this audiobook for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
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