Mur Lafferty

Mallory Viridian is very, very good at solving murders, it's just that they also seem to haunt her, everywhere she goes it appears that someone gets killed. Now she lives on a sentient space station with aliens, an ambassador for earth and one other fugitive human. She's content with her life until an announcement that more humans are coming. When they arrive, deaths start to happen and Mallory has to use her unique skills to discover who is guilty of all the deaths. Added to the mix is her stepmother who seems to want to reconcile with her. Still Mallory's life is getting messy again and suspicion is building that she might be a killer, again.

It was a fun read with solid characters and a lot of red herrings thrown in to confuse.… (more)

Clones, murders, spaceships and mayhem. A little on the gory side - I had to take a few breaks and read ahead when someone lost an eye in too graphic details for my delicate sensibilities

A truly interesting science fiction novel set on a colony space ship bound for a new planet. To get around the very long travel time (no FTL travel here) it is crewed by clones, all with their own secrets and motivations to commit to a 400 year long travel with only 5 other people as company.

The plot revolves around the murder of the crews previous clones, and the 25 years missing memories that proceed their murders and reawakening in new bodies.

The use of technology is very satisfactory without verging into hard science fiction, and although the story takes place on a spaceship, there are hints of cyber punk.

The internal logic of the plot is sometimes missing - for instance, one character has, for clone reasons, two sets of childhood memory, although we are told that cloning is always done with adult bodies. And the overarching plot bringing all the different threads together is not very believable or well-founded, making it feel very deux-ex-machina and not very satisfactory.… (more)