Genres: Adult, Queer Protagonists, Sci Fi
Representation: Sapphic MC, secondary M/M
PoV: First-person, past-tense
Published on: 18th March 2025
ISBN: 1250342252
Goodreads
A Memory Called Empire meets Miss Marple in this cozy, spaceborne mystery, helmed by a no-nonsense formidable auntie of a detective.
Welcome to the HMS Fairweather, Her Majesty’s most luxurious interstellar passenger liner! Room and board are included, new bodies are graciously provided upon request, and should you desire a rest between lifetimes, your mind shall be most carefully preserved in glass in the Library, shielded from every danger.
Near the topmost deck of an interstellar generation ship, Dorothy Gentleman wakes up in a body that isn’t hers—just as someone else is found murdered. As one of the ship’s detectives, Dorothy usually delights in unraveling the schemes on board the Fairweather, but when she finds that someone is not only killing bodies but purposefully deleting minds from the Library, she realizes something even more sinister is afoot.
Dorothy suspects her misfortune is partly the fault of her feckless nephew Ruthie who, despite his brilliance as a programmer, leaves chaos in his cheerful wake. Or perhaps the sultry yarn store proprietor—and ex-girlfriend of the body Dorothy is currently inhabiting—knows more than she’s letting on. Whatever it is, Dorothy intends to solve this case. Because someone has done the impossible and found a way to make murder on the Fairweather a very permanent state indeed. A mastermind may be at work—and if so, they’ve had three hundred years to perfect their schemes…
I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Highlights
~summer storm > brandy
~KNITTING
~an inventors’ club
~being shelved together is The Most Romantic
~a drunk AI
I don’t often use this word, but: Murder by Memory is such a fun little romp!
Near the topmost deck, in a small lift with glass walls and flickering buttons, I, Dorothy Gentleman, ship’s detective, opened a pair of eyes and licked a pair of lips and awoke in a body that wasn’t mine.
It also very deftly and economically sketches out a setting I really want more of: the Fairweather is a spaceship that is functionally a city, carrying 10,000+ people from Earth to some new planet they won’t reach for centuries. Unlike a generation ship, though, the Fairweather intends to land with its original passengers, not their descendants, and it’s done this by granting them a kind of immortality: when they die, a digital copy of their consciousness is placed in a new copy of their body, and ta da, they’re walking around again!
(I immediately wanted to know if anyone was having children in this set-up, if that was allowed, but no word on that in this instalment.)
Even though the Fairweather seems to function as a kind of utopia, there are still accidents and crimes, which means there are still detectives – although I was fascinated to discover that they don’t have the power to arrest anyone; they’re literally just supposed to investigate. Our MC Dorothy is one of these detectives, and is called out of digital storage after some very suspicious things go down.
Murder by Memory has a quite lovely Gilded Age vibe to it, despite the far-future setting, and it’s plenty cosy. We have a ship AI who can get drunk; a library of crystal books where the passengers’ consciousnesses are stored; and cocktails that are made of memories instead of alcohol. There are little hints of worldbuilding that made me hungry to know more, like romances that last centuries, a reference to ‘turns’ that implies not every passenger is embodied at the same time (why not?), and the plan to give up immortality when they eventually reach their new planet. (That seems a naive expectation, but okay.) And of course, this is a form of immortality that I really hate, because it’s not immortality – the original consciousness doesn’t live forever, it just keeps getting copied, and I wonder if the passengers will realise that and have to face it when they reach the planet and are supposed to stay in just the one body until it dies?
Dorothy isn’t a hyper-genius like Sherlock Holmes, but she’s smart and methodical and deeply nosy (in a way that might be annoying to live with, but definitely makes her a great character). It certainly doesn’t take her very long to tease out what happened and why. The picture that’s revealed bit by bit is deeply horrifying but sadly believable – yeah, I can buy that terrible people might do that – but the tone is light enough that I doubt most readers will have trouble sleeping afterwards or anything.
It’s a lovely little read, an easy four-stars.
But…
Maybe it’s just that I don’t read enough novellas, but I was left feeling…really unsatisfied, like, that’s it??? Comparing it to the other novellas I’ve read recently – Adrift in Currents Clear and Clean and Orb of Cairado – Murder by Memory feels lacking. Not in quality – it deserves all of its four stars, and I’d give it four point five if the plugin I use to mark ratings let me! But Adrift and Orb both felt chunkier, chewier – they packed a lot more story into their pages.
This might be helped by the fact that both are significantly longer – Adrift is 140 pages on my ereader; Orb, 149 pages. Murder by Memory, on the other hand, is only 80 pages on my ereader.
Look: on the dreaded Big River site, Murder by Memory is $12. Adrift, which is published by Tordotcom just like Murder, is $13. I don’t begrudge it that price, for the record. But paying only one dollar less for Murder, which is about half the length???
Tor, I love you, and I have defended your novella prices for years…but no freaking way.
Murder by Memory is lovely. If you want to read it, I recommend you borrow it from the library. Paying $12 for it – or $20.45, for the hardcover! – makes no sense.
That’s interesting because “That’s it?” was my exact feeling about Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear. I felt like it didn’t tell us a single thing Nadia hadn’t already told us in previous stories. Honestly a lot of McGuire’s novellas have felt that way lately, like they rushed along so fast it was hard to even tell what had happened. Fortunately, I think Audible knew Adrift is kind of a nothing burger and priced the novella at 5 dollars so I didn’t feel robbed or anything. I do get you on the pricing. I always wanted to get into The Singing Hills books but the audio narrator has chosen to read them in a kind of stage whisper and I have Meniere’s Disease, I can’t make out a word they’re saying, and looking at screens too long triggers my vertigo so in that case I’m stuck with physical books but they cost about 22 dollars a piece. I ended up getting the first three books through interlibrary loan but then nobody had the last two so I bought them for myself at Christmas. Now I have an incomplete set but at that price it’s going to have to stay that way.
I was definitely a bit confused by Adrift, because sure, we knew the generalities of all that already. I liked diving into all the details though (pun unintended), and I thought it was one of the more original settings in the series and enjoyed exploring it. I wonder if we’ll see Nadia return there? Because we already know she got to go back. If that’s a story McGuire wants to tell, it makes sense to give us Nadia’s first journey there before she gives us her return. ???
I don’t read audiobooks very often, and narrators whispering is one reason why! I know what it’s like when intersecting issues make it hard to read some formats, it sucks. And it IS really hard to justify buying such short books at such prices. I deal with it because I love Vo’s writing, and I’m so picky about prose that that’s a big deal for me, but I’d REALLY like to hear Tor justify those prices sometime.
I suspect it’s paper? Basically all paper comes from China and is increasingly hard to get. The people who make art books and comics are really suffering. I bought The Woods All Black in hardcover and don’t regret it even though I read it in a single sitting. It’s worth it to know I will always have my copy barring some personal disaster. But yeah, I gave up manga pretty much immediately because who can afford that. Very tempted to go back for Delicious in Dungeon though.
I would agree, except Tor has priced its novellas very high from the beginning, so I don’t think it can be solely the cost of paper. I buy paper books very rarely, but for exactly the same reason, so I have a copy that’s quite hard to take away from me! But for me there’s some difference between ‘read in a single sitting’ (like Woods All Black) and ‘read in half an hour’. Murder by Memory feels more like a short story than a novella to me, which I think is the main problem.
I never got into manga mostly because I read too fast, and as a teen couldn’t justify buying books that wouldn’t last me very long. So I never got into the habit. Nowdays I just don’t have a good way to read them on a screen, since my hands can’t handle paper books very well, alas!
I do feel very sorry for all the comic creators and readers, though. RE the paper prices. I wonder how hard it would be for other countries to set up paper creation? Finland exports a TON, for example (it’s still about 75% wild country, so a lot of forests). But presumably they don’t sell for as cheaply as China?