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| Trade paperback, 391 pages Published 2017 Acquired and read April 2018 |
This book has an amazing opening and an amazing premise. A locked room murder mystery where all the victims and all the suspects are mindwiped clones. All six members of the ship's crew have just been killed and resurrected, but they don't remember which of their number did it because the memory backups of their lives on the ship have been erased. The opening, with the clones waking up amid the zero-g remains of their previous bodies, is incredible.
Unfortunately, the energy of the novel slowly dissipates after that point. Mystery is a hard genre to write, and Lafferty doesn't really succeed. I feel like the characters kind of wander around aimlessly instead of investigating, and the revelation of facts feels like information-dumping, not slowly unspooling clues. In a good mystery, when the killer is revealed you go "Oh........" as everything slots into place. In this one, unfortunately, you just go "Oh." because the reveal feels arbitrary. Any one of the main characters could have done it, and it would have made just as much sense, which is profoundly unsatisfying. I'd like to see someone else have a go at this premise, though, because it is irresistible.
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