Station Eternity (The Midsolar Murders #1) by Mur Lafferty

  

My rating: 2.5 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Sci-fi, Mystery
Content: Strong language, including the C word used once

 

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…

 

I really liked this author's book Six Wakes a lot, so I was looking forward to reading this one. This is a little different than I was expecting. I started out liking it. We got all the backstory of how Mallory came to be on the station. I liked the characters a lot, and I liked the humorous nods to things. One thing that came to mind was that the whole thing about people being murdered when Mallory's around seemed like the author poking fun at the way a lot of mystery series go, with the detective always stumbling upon a murder to solve. It happens to Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple all the time, and it happens to Jessica Fletcher in Murder She wrote, just to name a few. Anyway, I liked the funny parts. I liked the types of aliens that were in the book. I liked the overall oddness of the book. However, it eventually went off the rails for me with too many points of view and too many characters that I really didn't care about. It was also longer than it needed to be. I felt like the different elements in the story just kind of ruined the pacing and distracted from the mystery. One big thing for me, was that there weren't enough clues dropped for the mystery. It was a case of, this is what happened, who did this and why, without much investigation. 

If you enjoyed the Space Janitor Series by Julia Huni you might like this one. There are a lot of similarities. I ended up liking that series better than this one, though I had issues with it too. I'm sorry to say that I don't think I want to continue on with this series.