Amazon Cover
BOOK BLURB ON AMAZON
In this Hugo nominated science fiction thriller by Mur Lafferty, a crew of clones awakens aboard a space ship to find they’re being hunted-and any one of them could be the killer.
Maria Arena awakens in a cloning vat streaked with drying blood. She has no memory of how she died. This is new; before, when she had awakened as a new clone, her first memory was of how she died.
Maria’s vat is one of seven, each one holding the clone of a crew member of the starship Dormire, each clone waiting for its previous incarnation to die so it can awaken. And Maria isn’t the only one to die recently. . .
Unlock the bold new science fiction thriller that Corey Doctorow calls Mur’s “breakout book”.
MY REVIEW
In a world when cloning gives effective immortality to the clone elite, murder varies between horrific permanency for the humans on their first go round without the rights of clones (but with the privilege of reproduction) to a minor inconvenience when attending parties (because clones backup their mindmaps before attending in case of corporate assassinations). A group of clones wake up on a spaceship in the middle of a bloodbath, their previous bodies floating around stabbed, poisoned, and strangled. Only problem, the bodies are twenty-five years older than their memories.
What has happened in the last 25 years? And who killed them?
The mystery unfolds revealing a tangled web which only immortal gods can rival. Over a thousand years of combined history, revenge, loves, beliefs, paranoia, and missing years assembled in six people (some over 200 years old) in a small spaceship pressure cooker complete with a not-so-helpful-or-obedient AI over two decades led to the explosive killing fields they woke up to. Now can they find the vent before the pressure cooker kills them all again, this time for real as no extra clone bodies are available?
About mid-way through I was positive I would be rereading this book to catch all the nuisances and character traits of the mystery. Tightly written, with complicated characters, you are never sure who is the murderer(s?) until the end, discovering information alongside the victim-killers. This is not your mother’s cozy mystery, but a solid mix of science fiction and murder investigation in a closed room scenario.