Murder By Memory

A cozy mystery set in spaaaaaaaaaaaace. Georgia is the ship's detective in retirement, her memories shelved in the ship's library with everyone else's memories, ready to be uploaded into a new body when called for. But when the ship brings her back, rather than putting her memories into a brand new body just for her, her memories are placed within someone else's body as an emergency protocol after her memory book is destroyed. A shelf of memory books destroyed, a body found drowned in a bathtub, and Georgia herself with the sneaking suspicion she's just been sleeved into the killer's body.

This is a novella, so while all of these ideas sound good in theory, the book just doesn't have enough runway to pull any of it off. Dorothy never really struggles to solve anything, and just bounces from plot conversation to plot conversation until she reaches a conclusion and the mystery is solved. The crime itself is (ending spoilers here) a bit too white collar/pedestrian for my taste, given the setting, making it overall kind of...boring?

Also, for something that's only 100 pages, we do spin our wheels in the knitting shop a bit overlong.

I absolutely adore this book! Novellas are a hit or miss for me because it's so easy to include not enough or too much information but Olivia Waite was brilliant with balancing out the details! She sprinkled in just enough information about their society and tech for us to understand and all the characters were highly fascinating. This is truly a cozy queer scifi mystery that I thoroughly enjoyed and I'm so excited to read Book 2!

Thank you to Tordotcom for an ARC and getting us in contact with Olivia Waite for a Shit We've Read podcast interview!