Station Eternity (The Midsolar Murders, #1) by Mur Lafferty
We are thrown onto the alien world of Station Eternity along with our slightly unreliable narrator Mallory Viridian right from the first page. She’s about to confront one of the two only other humans on the Station with the news that more humans are coming.
Mallory has good reason to fear more humans– for most of her life, she’s been present when someone she knows gets murdered. Like all the time. And then she helps the suspicious authorities solve the case by noticing small details. They don’t like that.
So she escaped to a human-less Station where her only friends are aliens (notably Stephanie a giant rock-like Gneiss) and her friends and acquaintances are safe from her curse– or so she thought.
Just as the new humans are arriving, the alien symbiote of the sentient Station is murdered– and all hell breaks loose.
This story draws you into the “cozy” mystery by unlayering all the hidden connections in a wonderful way. You don’t see it coming, but as it is unfolded, the ripples up and down the story line become crystal clear. Loved all the backstory.
On the other hand, while some of the alien physiology, issues with humans living on a space station, etc. were interesting, some of them (especially Gneiss Tina’s personality) seemed a little like costuming.
But this book isn’t really about the fun of imagining true aliens, its more about uncovering the tangled web of connections and politics underneath Mallory’s story. There’s a lot of running to and fro from the station, and I occasionally lost track of the split up groups after the disaster, and sometimes Mallory and the other human felt way too similar in terms of POV and personality, but I’d definitely follow them on other adventures.
What I Should Have Said 