I recently read Jo Walton’s informal history of the Hugo awards, which prompted me to read this year’s Hugo nominees. I checked this out from my library as part of my effort to catch up.
I was frustrated with ‘The Spare Man.’ While it was certainly well written prose-wise, the characters were compelling, and I enjoyed the odd mixture of libertarian and progressive worldbuilding of the space ship, I didn’t like the plot. I’m picky when it comes to mystery novels.
Overall, this book was pleasantly readable. However, I gave up at 95% and DNF. I was too frustrated. I think I’m an oddball, and most people will like it. Please ignore me and read it.
This book was based upon the black-and-white move ‘The Thin Man.’ My family watched that series of films A LOT when I was growing up.
Spoilers Below. I’m writing this review in good faith, as one author reviewing another’s book, trying to balance positives with negatives.
WHAT IS THE TARGET AUDIENCE? WHAT GENRES? WHAT MAJOR TROPES?
- Falsely accused mystery
- Space Station/Spaceship mystery
- Rich heiress protagonist
- Space Noir
- 18+, but only because of alcohol use.
- Cute dog
MY EMOTIONAL RESPONSE/ FUN FACTOR
As stated, this book frustrated me. I’m a picky eater when it comes to mystery stories. Usually, I do my best to meet a book halfway. I try to get over my prejudices and give a book a chance. However, I had trouble meeting this book halfway. After you read a certain amount of crime novels/mystery novels, you begin to see patterns and understand how the genre works. This book didn’t really work in the greater context of the genre as a whole.
WARNING! QUIT READING NOW UNTIL YOU FINISH READING THE BOOK!
BIASES STATED
To put this review/study in proper context, you must know my starting point.
To start with, I’m a fan of the author’s. I’ve read six of her books. (Three Glamourist books, Ghost Talkers, the Original, and now this.)
I am a connoisseur of mystery novels. Growing up, I’d listen to cozies and classic whodunits and the occasional Tom Clancy with my mom when driving to school. We’d watch PBS mysteries together, like Poirot and Holmes and Miss Marple, and Nero Wolfe (though that wasn’t PBS). I’ve read several dozen urban fantasy mysteries. I’ve read and watched police procedurals, hardboiled noir, little old lady mysteries; I’ve read them all.
I’m especially a fan of ‘fair play’ mysteries, where the narrative provides all the clues needed to guess who the killer is before the main character does.
As a result, I’m picky when it comes to mystery novels. I generally hold them to higher standards than I do other genre books. This book’s mystery is ehhh, so I was never going to love it.
CONCEPT AND EXECUTION
This book’s concept is: “A husband and wife go on a cruise in space, only to be framed for a murder. While dealing with PTSD, chronic pain, terrible cops, and terrible wifi, the wife must sleuth out the real killer while avoiding being killed herself. Also a cute dog.”
This book had uneven execution.
Truly, I loved the protagonist. She was previously injured in a lab accident, and is now dealing with SEVERE pain and PTSD issues. She reminded me of the protagonist from Tchiakovsky’s ‘Elder Race,’ because Tesla has a brain implant which lets her cope with pain.
Balancing this is the plot. The actual mystery investigation suffered under it’s own weight. I prefer ‘fair play whodunnits,’ meaning a mystery where the reader can figure out the villain because the author lays out all the clues.
This book had four final act twists which were pretty much impossible to predict. You know how I dropped at the 95% mark? This is why. It was frustrating to have all my guesses rendered irrelevant again and again and again.
CHARACTERS, CHARACTERIZATION AND DIALOG
As stated above, I really enjoyed Tesla as a protagonist. She’s disabled and dealing with pain. She’s recovering from an opioid addiction caused by everything she’s gone through. I don’t like the trope of ‘the disabled person should suck it up and try harder and they’ll succeed’ because in the real world a disabled person CANNOT suck it up, that’s why they’re disabled. Tesla actively avoids this toxic trope.
- She has a brain implant to manage her pain,
- She has a cane
- She has various surgical internal screws and poles which restrict her movement
- She’s uses a service dog to deal with stress and panic attacks
Tesla does not magically get better by the end of the story. Instead, this is a heartfelt look at how someone in severe pain copes in their everyday life. That makes this book admirable.
It’s all kinda downhill from here.
Shal, Tesla’s husband, had a wishy-washy personality. He was a retired detective, and insists throughout this book that he does NOT want to get back into the gumshoe game. And yet time and again he helps Tesla in her efforts to solve the crime. I don’t understand why he never took a stand on either side, either going full ‘let’s be sleuths together’ or full ‘nope, let’s not solve this mystery.’ Not picking a side makes his characterization feel wobbly. (I did enjoy how affectionate their relationship was, though.)
Chief Wiser is the next most well-characterized character. He’s the trope of a ‘I want to do as little work as possible’ cop. He constantly jumps to conclusions. In the face of evidence that he’s wrong, he still refuses to change his mind. He knows he’s wrong, but he still refuses to change, even when people are dying because he’s stubborn. I hated him, and I think that was the author’s goal.
Honestly, I respect that the author went so far out on a limb with Chief Wiser. He’s such a moron that it took commitment to write someone so frustrating. A less determined author would have attempted to humanize him in some way. Nope, Wiser was completely irredeemable. I can’t say the author was lazy writing him like this; the author fully committed to the bit, and by definition, committing to a bit is not lazy writing. But at the same time, Wiser’s sheer stupidity undermined the believability of the setting. More on this below.
The characters all fall away from there in terms of characterization. I remember the lawyer for knitting. Maria the cop is very patient with Tesla’s antics. Ewen is a friendly soul, and his father abusive. Silver is a bit passive aggressive. I could keep going. This book had dozens of characters, but none of them were really fleshed out. That’s fine; only main characters need to be really fleshed out. The author gave the side characters enough that they didn’t feel two dimensional, but not too much that they became more interesting than the protagonists. A+ work.
And finally, Gimlet the dog. He absorbed too much pagecount. I swear, people cooing over Gimlet occupied about 5% of the pagecount. That was too much for me.
PACING AND STRUCTURE
I divide this book into the following acts:
- Before George dies
- While Shal is in the hospital for the first time
- After Shal is poisoned and is recovering.
- Yoga and Fish’s death
- Running around the spaceship’s promenade after random dudes.
- Silver
- The climax
This book was slow paced. I was bored up until the point that Fish died.
I think part of the problem is that this book was devoted to ONLY being from Tesla’s viewpoint. There are points in time when being from Shal’s viewpoint would have been more engaging. Shal regularly ran around, chasing down fleeing suspects. Tesla, being disabled, pursued more sedately and never saw things happen. The narrative should have split off from Tesla then and gone to Shal.
PLOT, STAKES AND TENSION
I don’t like talking about plotholes, but this book had enough of them to disrupt my suspension of disbelief.
- Police are supposed to interview witnesses promptly after crimes; the longer you wait, the more details are forgotten of the event in question. The police did NOT interview Tesla promptly after the first crime.
- Tesla was the first person on the scene, and provided first aid to the wounded. She would be a person of interest. IRL, the police would spend several minutes asking her questions. In the book, the police barely spoke with her after George’s death.
- After the 3rd murder, they FINALLY sit down with Tesla for a formal interview. That was 60% of the way into the book!
- The police aren’t supposed to say things like ‘We caught the killer’ mere moments after restraining a suspect, because the suspect hasn’t gone to trial yet.
- Telling one potential witness that ‘we caught the killer’ predisposes the witness to give you inaccurate/filtered testimony. That angers judges, and might get the entire case thrown out. This is sloppy police work.
- I understand that the author wants to write the cops as being bad at their job, but this is so bad as to trigger my ‘suspension of disbelief’ alarm. Of all the police officers, the chief of police would be least likely to fall for this rookie mistake.
- Holy cow, breaking a prisoner’s ribs is a good way to lose your case in front of a judge.
- Follow the papertrail, check the alibis and check the logs
- At one point, a bottle of falsely prescribed opioids becomes a piece of evidence. The narrative forgot that a doctor must have been involved for medicine prescription to be involved. (Was it Fish? Seems important.) Similarly, they only checked the ship’s logs for who was where when really late in the book.
- Shal was framed for murder, because his fingerprints were on the knife. The police never asked about the alibi.
- A normal cop today would refer back to the papertrail first thing, because it’s easy to do. A lazy cop like Wiser would still do this, because it’s easy to delegate it to a junior officer.
- The octopod never appeared on video. How is that possible?
- The octobot used to murder people never appeared on camera because it was protected by a video spoofer.
- However, the book also claimed that video spoofers disrupts the radio waves used to control the bot. How can the octobot both be invisible to cameras, and also be remote controlled? By this book’s internal logic, these are mutually exclusive.
- And there’s more I’m not listing here for time.
The author wrote this book with the cops being corrupt/sloppy so the protagonist had to do the investigating herself. This didn’t work for me. This is a progressive setting. In progressive politics, there’s a focus on ‘police should not beat up prisoners’ and ‘police should be well trained and good at their jobs.’ In the progressive society featured in this book, the police suck. This book’s worldbuilding feels inconsistent.
This book was written to be evocative of ‘The Thin Man,’ a 1930’s cozy noir movie. All the plot holes I spotted are only plot holes in the modern day, or in a near future setting; in the context of a 1930’s mystery movie, corrupt cops/sloppy investigations makes sense.
This book wants to have it’s cake and eat it too. Cops beating up prisoners a la the 1930’s, and cameras everywhere clash with one another. The 2075 progressive setting, and cops not looking into the paper trail of evidence clash with one another.
I fundamentally don’t think the knitting together of old Noir and Near Future policing tropes worked.
In the final act of the book, the book pulled an Agatha Christie and had all the potential suspects dragged into a room together so the detectives could do an impressive monologue and expose the secrets of everyone. I really didn’t like this scene.
We had four last-minute plot twists: two body doubles (Yuki had a twin brother, and Halden was secretly dead and replaced by an actor), Ewen was stolen as a child from his mother and raised in secret by a stranger, and one final assassination attempt against the protagonists.
One thing Christie did well was give every suspect a method and motive for the murder, only to reveal one final piece of evidence at the very end which clinches which potential suspect is the correct one. This way, Christie lays out several red herrings early on to give the reader multiple competing options for who killed the victim.
It felt like this book attempted to do the same thing, but less skillfully. First, the narrative didn’t explore the alibis and motives for all the potential suspects. And second…
- The ‘Yuki’s twin’ thing didn’t work.
- Yuki’s twin was introduced too late, in the final confrontation scene. This was too late because the plot twist of the twin was introduced and dismissed at the same time. This plot twist had no value as a result. You need to let a red herring sit and ferment for a while for it to have any value.
- Instead of introducing Yuki’s twin in the ‘final confrontation’ scene, he needed to be introduced several chapters earlier. That way we would know the yoga instructor wasn’t the true suspect, but one of the twins.
- Also, why did Yuki have a twin on board, and why was the twin a secret to everyone? The Doyleist reason Yuki’s twin is on board is to be a red herring. What’s the Watsonian reason? Why did Yuki bring his brother aboard? Did I just miss an explanation?
- We needed more foreshadowing that it was possible for Halden to be an actor.
- There was a tiny amount of foreshadowing, in retrospect, but it was so vague as to be unfair towards the reader.
- The whole ‘Ewen being stolen and raised in secret’ was unexpected, but good. A lot of stories like this have a similar side reveal. +1 to the author.
These were all ‘out-of-nowhere’ twists. If the book had only one out of nowhere twist in the book, it would be fine. But having three in one chapter was way too much. Why bother reading the rest of the book, when all the vital information was contained in the final three chapters?
As stated, I like fair-play whodunnits. This book did not play fair. Because of the way these red herrings were backloaded into the end of the book, they didn’t feel emotionally rewarding.
If I were to make an ultimate diagnosis, this book was too clever by half. Having secret twins, a body double, robot assassin travelling through the ducts, 8+ characters with fake identities… it just added up to an overcomplicated, tangled plot.
SETTING, WORLDBUILDING AND ORIGINALITY
I feel like the author intended to write a progressive future society, but bungled it and accidentally wrote a deeply libertarian setting instead.
- The protagonist uses money to throw her weight around,
- The existence of video spoofers letting private individuals break the law without consequence,
- Tesla getting away with hotwiring doors in front of the chief of police.
- Corrupt cops representing a decaying public sector
- A highly individualistic society where people can announce their pronouns.
- The existence of a tacit aristocracy and intergenerational wealth masked under a meritocracy, as signified by Tesla’s inheritance from an engineering empire. And also all the other wealthy engineers in this book who were killed/nearly killed.
I really liked this setting. I’ve never read anything like this before, except maybe Jackson’s Whole from the Vorkosigan Saga.
I enjoyed the space setting. This is my first space Sci-Fi by Kowal, and I have to say she does gravity good. I liked how she made orbital trajectories of gravity a storybeat. On a rotating, circular spaceship, there is no true gravity. Instead ‘down’ is caused by the rotation of the ships sections. Thus, instead of falling straight down, people fall at an angle.
I enjoyed how Tesla used her engineering skills to transform a matter printer into a molecular scanner. She was once an engineer, but after her lab accident she gets PTSD whenever she starts engineering things. I liked that she had to push through her anxiety to disassemble and reassemble the scanner. I wish she had to do it again at the end of the book.
I wish the book did more to explore the spoofers. This book claimed that spoofers disrupt the octopoid robot assassin. I would have liked if someone at some point threw an active spoofer at the assassin to turn it off mid-assassination attempt. Go back to that spoofer worldbuilding again and again, and use it in clever ways.
LESSONS LEARNED
As an author, I want to improve my own writing/editing skills. To that end, I like to learn lessons from every story I read. Here’s what I learned from this story:
- When writing mysteries, lay out your red herrings before the 3/4s mark. Don’t backload them all to the end of the book.
- Gravity is cool. I liked how this book played around with gravity in a space setting, when it comes to being a murder weapon. Because the space station rotates, you have to factor in the space station’s rotation into the trajectory for any thrown weapons.
Here’s a link to all the lessons I’ve previously learned.
SUMMARY
This book is fine, I’m just a picky reader when it comes to mystery novels because I’ve read hundreds of them. I’m sure most people would like it. Feel free to read it.
Did you like this critique/review? Here are some more: The Rest of My In Depth Reviews
On a personal note, I’m open to editing books. I don’t like putting myself out here like this, but I’ve been told I should. Check my blog for details if interested.
John Mendez- Book Reviews and More 