Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty (Ace)
Poor Mallory! Ever since she can remember, she’s been a
magnet for murders. To make matters worse, only she has the intuition and
insight to solve them. This hasn’t put her in favor with law enforcement, once
they figure out she isn’t the killer, she’s just bad luck. As a social pariah,
she’s tried to fly under the radar. Then aliens contact Earth and agree to
accept a human ambassador to their space station (Eternity). For some reason,
the sentient station allows Mallory to come onboard, too. For Mallory, getting
as far away from other humans as possible seems like the solution to murders always
happening near her.
Until word comes that a shuttle filled with humans is on its
way to Eternity, perfect fodder for the next round of killings. What a great
set-up!
There’s more, of course. It turns out that Mallory and the
quintessentially nasty ambassador are not the only humans onboard Eternity.
There’s a third, Xan, AWOL from the military after all evidence points to him
as the perpetrator of the last murder Mallory found herself involved in.
Actually, he was the target, but it takes the two of them overcoming their
extreme reluctance to interact to figure it out.
In the midst of all this, Eternity’s hostile-to-the-point-of-rudeness
symbiote who is her link to organic beings is killed and the station goes berserk.
Lafferty shifts from the focus on two people, Mallory and
Lan, to a widening cast of characters in a manner that reminds me strongly of
her brilliant science fiction murder-mystery-on-a-spaceship, Six Wakes.
The characters all have ties to one another, and such a pattern of interactions
and relationships precipitates a murder, or so Mallory believes. If she doesn’t
figure out what’s happening, the list of victims is sure to skyrocket. What
seems at first to be a series of side-tracks is really a spiral network of
connections that all come together in a most satisfying manner.
