ARC Review: Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty

Station Eternity
Author: Mur Lafferty
Series: The Midsolar Murders (Book 1)
Publication: Ace (October 4, 2022)

Description: Amateur detective Mallory Viridian’s talent for solving murders ruined her life on Earth and drove her to live on an alien space station, but her problems still follow her in this witty, self-aware novel that puts a speculative spin on murder mysteries, from the Hugo-nominated author of Six Wakes.

From idyllic small towns to claustrophobic urban landscapes, Mallory Viridian is constantly embroiled in murder cases that only she has the insight to solve. But outside of a classic mystery novel, being surrounded by death doesn’t make you a charming amateur detective, it makes you a suspect and a social pariah. So when Mallory gets the opportunity to take refuge on a sentient space station, she thinks she has the solution. Surely the murders will stop if her only company is alien beings. At first her new existence is peacefully quiet…and markedly devoid of homicide.

But when the station agrees to allow additional human guests, Mallory knows the break from her peculiar reality is over. After the first Earth shuttle arrives, and aliens and humans alike begin to die, the station is thrown into peril. Stuck smack-dab in the middle of an extraterrestrial whodunit, and wondering how in the world this keeps happening to her anyway, Mallory has to solve the crime—and fast—or the list of victims could grow to include everyone on board….

My Thoughts: Mallory Viridian fled to Station Eternity so that people would quit being murdered around her. The murders started when she was a child and continued until she left the planet. Mallory was able to make some good of it; she became an author who lightly fictionalized her cases and made her living that way. But being forced to move from place to place and being denied any opportunity to be a police officer or a private investigator, left her rootless and very lonely.

When she learns that Station Eternity is getting ready to accept more human visitors, she is getting set to run away again, but there is no place for her to run. She's one of only three humans surrounded by thousands of aliens. She has made some friends with a gneiss named Stephanie and an AWOLArmy soldier named Xan Morgan. The third human is an ambassador sent from Earth to negotiate for alien technology. 

When the shuttle carrying new human visitors is attacked and Ren who is the symbiont of the sentient station is killed, Mallory is the only one who can investigate what happened since the regular law enforcement is busy trying to stabilize the station and save the residents.

I really enjoyed the worldbuilding in this story. The different alien races were well-developed, The rock-like gneiss, the hive-mind Sundry who look like blue and silver wasps, the Gurudev who look like a humanoid stick insect, and the phantasmagore who have chameleon-like abilities of disguise all have their own cultures and desires which may or may not play into the case Mallory is investigating. 

It turns out that many of the shuttle's survivors also have connections to both Mallory and Xan and agendas of their own. We learn about some of those connections in flashbacks that fill in information about them all. 

While this story was a mystery in that it had lots of mysteries to solve and actually did solve some of them, I think the real focus for me was the worldbuilding and all of the interesting life forms that lived in Station Eternity.

Science fiction fans will enjoy this story.

Favorite Quote:

"Me? I can't plan. I am the problem people plan around," she said, confused.

"I think you need to figure out who told you that, and go punch them," he said. The exit unfolded then, making Mallory jump. "Or tell me and I'll punch them," he added, walking past her to the exit. 

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