Short Book Reviews: A Murder Magnet Takes on a Sentient Spaceship
Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty (Ace)

Poor Mallory! Ever since she can remember, she’s been amagnet for murders. To make matters worse, only she has the intuition andinsight to solve them. This hasn’t put her in favor with law enforcement, oncethey figure out she isn’t the killer, she’s just bad luck. As a social pariah,she’s tried to fly under the radar. Then aliens contact Earth and agree toaccept a human ambassador to their space station (Eternity). For some reason,the sentient station allows Mallory to come onboard, too. For Mallory, gettingas far away from other humans as possible seems like the solution to murders alwayshappening near her.
Until word comes that a shuttle filled with humans is on itsway to Eternity, perfect fodder for the next round of killings. What a greatset-up!
There’s more, of course. It turns out that Mallory and thequintessentially nasty ambassador are not the only humans onboard Eternity.There’s a third, Xan, AWOL from the military after all evidence points to himas the perpetrator of the last murder Mallory found herself involved in.Actually, he was the target, but it takes the two of them overcoming theirextreme reluctance to interact to figure it out.
In the midst of all this, Eternity’s hostile-to-the-point-of-rudenesssymbiote who is her link to organic beings is killed and the station goes berserk.
Lafferty shifts from the focus on two people, Mallory andLan, to a widening cast of characters in a manner that reminds me strongly ofher brilliant science fiction murder-mystery-on-a-spaceship, Six Wakes.The characters all have ties to one another, and such a pattern of interactionsand relationships precipitates a murder, or so Mallory believes. If she doesn’tfigure out what’s happening, the list of victims is sure to skyrocket. Whatseems at first to be a series of side-tracks is really a spiral network ofconnections that all come together in a most satisfying manner.