Author: Erin Penn

Book Review (SERIES): The MidSolar Murders

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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?

 

Amazon Cover

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.

Amazon Cover

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.

Flash – Laying Easter Eggs Part 2: The Dinobirds

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Photo by Edrick Krozendijk on Unsplash

“Oh, that is a beaute of a rock.” FishDiver shared with his scouting wingmate as SoaringHigh cleansed the gel from her feathers.

Febirds and wifbirds took longer than werebirds to crawl out of the deep cold; he had been functional for nearly six hours. Mesbirds, the fourth gender of their species, couldn’t handle cryogenics at all and were limited to their homeworld of Air and two of the nearby colony worlds the Tortoises had prepared for them in hopes of their Potential nearly a hundred thousand years ago. At least that had been the case when they left their colony four hundred years ago. Who knows what the tech was like now.

Of the twelve in cryogenics, it was their turn to wake upon reaching a system and they had struck a warm updraft. Flipping through the screens with claw and wing tips, FishDiver said, “Definitely a Tortoise Shell world. Running possibilities now to see where the Potentials are likely to be.”

“Don’t mess with me.” SoaringHigh slipped into the roosting bar next to FishDiver, their ninth shift together while the FarFlyer made its long search. “A real Tortoise Shell world?”

“It is still clearing out its orbit. Look at all the comet trails through the system directing material impacts on the planet, the only one completely in the liquid water zone. No way those flight paths are natural.”

“Don’t make assumptions. We don’t want to look like we jumped off a cliff.”

“Stop being a scientist for once and believe your eyes and the breeze.” He bobbed his head at the displays. “Tell me that doesn’t look just like the systems for Cloud and Wind.”

Tears slid down SoaringHigh’s beak as she watched the dance of rocks their computer faithfully recorded as they slept the three years traveling, slowing down from interstellar speed at the edges of the system’s Oorts cloud to a reasonable speed in the crowded the inner system. “Potential species fourteen,” she chirped. “The last of them. Only two of the seventeen Potentials failed.”

“Now who is making assumptions. We don’t know where the actual Potentials are yet. Yellow or orange star, maybe a very young red. Solitary.” FishDiver added the specific distance within the liquid water zone the modified rock tumbled through. A highly carbon-dioxide atmosphere and acidic water flowed over the rocky surface, not livable yet, and not livable at all for their species nested under a binary white star, but the potential was there for the right Potential. He set the navigation system searching the stellar roosting branch. “Look around and see if the Tortoises left a Note. I’ll get some grubs going.” He had been ignoring his crop for the last three hours waiting for Soaring to become functional enough for social eating, but it was time to fill it so he could really concentrate on what the computer was feeding them.

Twenty minutes later, because whoever had closed up after the last failed flight hadn’t cleaned up their mess in the mess hall, he returned with two small lidded bowls of artificially wiggling worm proteins. He had downed one by himself while putting everything back into place, cryo-processing vacated the system before cold storage leaving him empty from beak to tail.

“Thank you.” Soaring said, accepting her food and setting within the stowage space in case of loss of gravity. Somehow she never needed food immediately upon coming awake. You think as a febird nearly half again his weight, she would need food even more. “Found the Note. Primates are the Potentials; the navigation search you set up came back with the same data the translator did for the star location mentioned in the Note. About 10.5 lightyears away. Normally that is the furthest out the Tortoises go for their six gifts of Shells, but this escarpment has nothing nearby. The rest of the gifts, if they exist, are even further scattered.”

“And nearly twenty years to get up to speed, cross the distance, and check to see if the Potentials have survived.” Fish stabbed at his food in anger. “We are going to need to wake the others. How far is Air?”

“The homeworld is a hundred fifteen light-years toward galaxy center; the graviton will have a message there in fifteen days by relay. If technology hasn’t been upgraded or degraded, more ships can be here in about a hundred fifty years to start the next stage of preparing the Shell. All the instructions of what to do next after the cooldown are in the Note like normal.”

“A shame the first sentients to emerge after the Tortoises were the Competitors.”

“Those shelled creatures were not ready for those ravenous beasts.” Soaring shook her feathers down. “To wait over eighty thousand years, through nineteen different dynasties, for someone else to talk with and get the Competitors. To have to extinguish the only other intelligent species you met after working so long to help everyone to come after you.”

“To the Tortoises. Long may they fly.” Fish lifted his cup into the air.

Soaring removed her bowl from stowage and did likewise. “Or crawl if they prefer.”

(words 856; first published 3/15/2026)

Laying Easter Eggs Series

  1. The Tortoises (3/8/2026)
  2. The Dinobirds (3/15/2026)
  3. Crocabillies (3/22/2026)
  4. Monkeys Start Hunting for Eggs (3/29/2026)

Editing Rant: Two-Page Paragraphs

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Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

If your paragraph goes on for two pages of your document, it is too long.

Yes, editing a document with not one but THREE paragraphs exceeding a page of the manuscript and one of them is over two pages long.

Shoot for a third-of-a-page max.

Yes, authors used to do this in the past, but with e-books a solid page with no indents or paragraph returns hurts the eyes and turns off readers. If you want to publish, you write to mediums of your day: serials for newspapers, pulp fiction for pulp, and eye movement for e-books.

Use white-space for storytelling. It’s a powerful tool.

DO NOT HAVE TWO-PAGE PARAGRAPHS!!!!!

Side note: The other end of the spectrum of every.single.sentence.is.a.paragraph is equally as bad. (Ignore this article as an example, it is a RANT for crying out loud. Normal writing rules do not apply when someone is going off the hinges.)

Paragraphs are three to five sentences (in general) centered around an action or theme. This applies to both nonfiction and fiction.

As for white space is your friend, if you are unfamiliar with the thought, see “Writing Exercise: Paragraph Breaks (2/23/2016)“.

Go out. Write. Wield the Pen.

AND USE THE CARRIAGE RETURN!!!

(Off to figure out how many paragraphs this two-page monster actually should be.)

Flash – Laying Easter Eggs Part 1: The Tortoises

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Photo by Emma on Unsplash

“Search Group 739 confirming orbit perimeters. This one is a big one, iron core with a bit of nickel mixed in. You are going to love it when it gets there.”

“Running orbit for planetary strike.” Merit pushed the numbers through the computer. “Sending adjustments now.” After clicking a few keys, they leaned back against their shell, pulling in three of their limbs. It had been a long shift. “And thanks for the find. We might make this cycle’s mineral goals.”

“First time this phase.” Highergoal responded via the graviton-wave communication unit, a noticeable four-second lag impacting the com-traffic even when by-passing the speed of light using gravity waves. The distance from inner system to the Oort cloud was no joke, leaving the three-tortoise Search Group teams alone for multi-year intervals. Which made them very chatty when they had an official reason to call in using the expensive graviton-wave. Part of Merit’s job was to provide the chat but keep it limited.  “Is Sector sure we can’t import from a neighbor? This system sucks eggs for heavy elements.”

“It will be too obvious when the Potentials hit stellar-flight. We wouldn’t want to unwrap their gifts too early.”

“Wouldn’t want that.” They responded sarcastically. “Aw, crack. Three orbits before it strikes the planet? That’s nearly two hundred and fifty years.”

“The gas giant is a problem, though it should make the Potentials feel at home in the system. Don’t worry, your gift will have plenty of time to mix in with the molten core.” Merit tapped the computer with their fourth manipulative limb. “The Planners think the planet won’t start cooling from the hits for about four thousand years.”

“Four thousand years. That is a long time to be alone.” HG sighed.

“Someone had to emerge first.” Two Search Groups within her arc of the cloud sent in shift change by clicks. Merit stored the information for the Planners to use for optimizing later.

“At least seventy thousand more years, best guess, for the next emergent Potential and nearly half a million for the Potential we are trying to help and just how much help will a planet over ten light years from their own going to give?”

“The council said six per Potential, an extra handful of chances to get them started on their interstellar settlements. It just so happens our Potential is toward the end of a galaxy arm, and believe it or not, this is the closest solitary star close to theirs without flares with a planet we can adjust to their gravity and chemistry.”

“Ten light years is the closest? Crack, there is no way they are going to make the jump.”

“All we can do is harden a Shell for them, we cannot make them crawl in when they grow too big for their home planet.”

“If we are still around.”

Merit pushed out all six of their limbs as their relief arrived, favorite morning stimulant in a claw-paw and today’s flimsy notices in a hoof-paw. “If we are still around,” they agreed with Highergoal while transferring systems to Courage’s favorite station. “We’ve made it nearly fifty thousand years among the stars. We have been in space nearly as long as we long as we had civilization on Soil. We will make it. We are never alone so long as there is a future.”

“There will a future so long as we prepare it.” Highergoal finished the mantra and prayer of their species.

(words 577; first published 3/10/2026)

Laying Easter Eggs Series

  1. The Tortoises (3/8/2026)
  2. The Dinobirds (3/15/2026)
  3. Crocabillies (3/22/2026)
  4. Monkeys Start Hunting for Eggs (3/29/2026)