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The Midsolar Mysteries series by Mur Lafferty
Book 1: Station Eternity
Book 2: Chaos Terminal
Book 3: Infinite Archive
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BOOK BLURB ON AMAZON for STATION ETERNITY
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 REVIEW for STATION ETERNITY
If Murder She Wrote’s Jessica Fletcher was Meta aware of the murders occurring around her were Unusual while being a 20-something woman and having the option to flee humanity to prevent being a murder magnet, we get the Midsolar Murders.
Aliens which are aliens. Humans worthy of a kind-of closed room Murder Mystery (when on a space station, no one can step outside easily). A sentient space station Going-Through-Things-At-The-Moment. And a protagonist aware she makes murders happen.
The threads of the mystery are so complicated that halfway through I lost everything. It felt like the plot completely evaporated into chaos and I nearly gave up on the book. I skipped to read the Epilogue before going to sleep (some of the issue of tracking everything could be the 3am hour), but that didn’t really answer anything other than give me some idea of who all makes it through the craziness.
I came back to the read after a couple days, since I bought both books one and two together (I loved previous books by the author; Mur Lafferty is an amazing writer and I was willing to take the financial risk on the series) and, dang it, I was going to read both of them even if Station Eternity was a failure! Then the impossible happens – the tangled knot of everything – like three kittens playing with a yarn project – smoothed out. Does everything get neatly tied off – well, no, there is more to this series – but the mystery gets an ending, all the characters get development (and I mean ALL of them), the world shifts and the foundation worldbuilding proves solid.
Wow.
I did mention Mur Lafferty is an amazing writer, right?
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BOOK BLURB ON AMAZON for CHAOS TERMINAL
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 REVIEW for CHAOS TERMINAL
I don’t know about this one, if it was me or the book that wasn’t engaging properly but I didn’t fall into this book. Maybe it was the murder victim was so unlikeable the general response by everyone was “well, better off dead.” It’s hard to root for a murder to be solved when the question isn’t “who did it” but “why wasn’t it done sooner?” I’ve had run into that sort of victim before, it helps the mystery when everyone has a reason to want the person dead, but this time, for me at least, figuring out the murder was second to everything else in the story. And there is a lot of other things happening!
The Midsolar Murders has another locked room mystery in that on a space station, there is no where to run. The aliens are very alien. The politics has humans still fumbling through first contact add complications. And talk about complications, our heroine’s first love shows up on the station with her only best friend to survive Mallory being a murder magnet.
Mallory is still linked to her wasp-bugs hivemind, so trying to link up with a potential boyfriend is problematic. Added to the fact Mrs. Brown has left the sentient station under Mallory’s care while she goes learn what it means to be the shepherd for an intelligent machine. (BTW Mallory is horrible as a babysitter.) And a new bunch of humans including a new ambassador to replace Adrian. Well, of course her murder magnet will activate.
Lots of things happening in this science fiction story. Which made the murder mystery suffer a breath (hard to breathe in the vacuum of space – or scream, just ask Tina). Good heading towards great but swerved before hitting it.
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BOOK BLURB ON AMAZON for INFINITE ARCHIVE
Amateur sleuth Mallory Viridian has just about got her bearings aboard the space station she calls home, but now the physical embodiment of the Internet is on its way, and it’s bringing murder with it.
Mallory Viridian has had a quiet few months. Even with the increased influx of humans visiting Station Eternity, she hasn’t seen so much as a bar brawl. Used to people dying left and right around her, the lack of murders to solve has left her unexpectedly . . . bored.
But humanity’s favorite way to waste time is on its way to her sector of the galaxy. A giant, one-of-a-kind data ship called Metis is bringing the entire Internet from Earth—as well as a mystery fan convention. On top of that, Mallory’s literary agent is aboard, and he tells Mallory that she’s the keynote speaker.
It’s almost a relief when a killer decides to strike at the convention. When Mallory finds her agent dead, she knows she has to work fast to find the murderer. With a strange new alien with unknown motives, a ship with impossible abilities, a lonely living, comprehensive Internet, and a deadly crime to solve, Mallory has her work cut out for her . . . .
MY REVIEW for INFINITE ARCHIVE
This book feels more like fan service than a science fiction murder mystery. I mean the whole series has had a little “wink, wink” to it with Mallory being a self-aware murder-magnet, but this takes it a step further, making the Easter eggs be more powerful than the actual plot. That line is thin and hard to spot, but I think we landed on the wrong side of it for making this book the BEST it could have been. It still is pretty darn good.
The in-book reading of another book – the detective noir sci-fi story starring plants as the main characters – both adds and distracts. (and this is like the third time in the last two years I’ve read books with this device) Part of the time my brain was comparing the Murder Mystery Convention on the space ship with the Murder Mystery Convention on a train in the “Everybody on This Train is a Suspect” by Benjamin Stevenson. Also comparing the con to attending conventions now even though this is taking place about twenty years in the future. Then the ship, Metis, is not only a convention but also a physical representation of the internet down to the cat room/videos.
Meanwhile, we continue to have the politics of the aliens, the politics of Earth, human interactions, the addition of the baby Mobius from the last book and all that entails (remember how in book 2 I said Mallory is an awful babysitter???), and, you know, the actual plot.
A lot is packed in between the pages. Of the three Midsolar Murders, book one was the best. If I didn’t have books one and two for comparison, I would have enjoyed book 3 as a farce – but I wanted more. Oh, and I read the book in one sitting – going to bed at 6:30 am because “one more chapter” syndrome is strong in this book. I wanted more, I wanted the book to be better, and I still couldn’t put it down.