ARC Review: Chaos Terminal by Mur Lafferty

Chaos Terminal
Author: Mur Lafferty
Series: The Midsolar Murders (Book 2)
Publication: Ace (November 7, 2023)

Description: Mallory Viridian would rather not be an amateur detective, and fled to outer space to avoid it…but when one of the new human arrivals on a space shuttle is murdered, she’s back in the game.

Mallory Viridian would rather not be an amateur detective, thank you very much. But no matter what she does, people persist in dying around her—and only she seems to be able to solve the crime. After fleeing to an alien space station in hopes that the lack of humans would stop the murders, a serial killer had the nerve to follow her to Station Eternity. (Mallory deduced who the true culprit was that time, too.)

Now the law enforcement agent who hounded Mallory on Earth has come to Station Eternity, along with her teenage crush and his sister, Mallory’s best friend from high school. Mallory doesn’t believe in coincidences, and so she’s not at all surprised when someone in the latest shuttle from Earth is murdered. It’s the story of her life, after all.

Only this time she has more than a killer to deal with. Between her fugitive friends, a new threat arising from the Sundry hivemind, and the alarmingly peculiar behavior of the sentient space station they all call home, even Mallory’s deductive abilities are strained. If she can’t find out what’s going on (and fast), a disaster of intergalactic proportions may occur.…

My Thoughts: This is the second book in the Midsolar Mysteries which take place on Space Station Eternity. The station is filled with aliens of all varieties and just a few humans. Mallory Viridian came to live on the space station because she wanted to get away from murders. They happened around her all the time on Earth.

She learned in the first book of the series that she was stung by wasp-like aliens called the Sundry who made her part of their hive. It ws this that gave her the ability to solve murders.

Now the station has a new host - a human named Mrs. Brown - who takes off in a sentient spaceship to learn more about her new duties and leaves Mallory in charge. Unfortunately, Mallory is losing her ability to solve murders, the blue and Silver Sundry are being attacked by the green Sundry who act as cuckoos in the hive, and humans she has known since middle school are coming to the station along with the new ambassador. 

The green Sundry are the least intelligent of all Sundry which causes a problem since they are in charge of the systems that run the space station and they are not listening to her or any of the other aliens except Tina who is Gneiss and who has problems with impulse control. Tina is slated to become queen of a prison planet, but she has broken Gneiss laws in regard to transforming herself and her government wants to arrest her. 

This was a wonderful story filled with adventure, intriguing aliens, and even a possible romance. Oh, and Mallory solves a murder and her friend Xan, an AWOL soldier from Earth, acts as Tina's advisor which, after some confusion, manages to get things back to normal. Or as close to normal as it can be on this space station.

I received this one in exchange for an honest review from NetGalley. You can buy your copy here.