A locked room mystery, a human murder magnet, and aliens combined into a slightly messy story


I love mysteries, and Science Fiction is a genre that has been growing on me the last couple of years. Station Eternity advertised a locked room mystery on a sentient alien space ship which sounded cool and intriguing. I had mixed feelings about the other book I’d read by Lafferty, Six Wakes, so I thought I’d give this one a try.

There were a lot of interesting elements in the story. The main character, Mallory, stumbles upon murder literally wherever she goes. I liked that that aspect of the story poked fun at the typical amateur detective stumbling upon an unreasonable number of murders. But Mallory grows weary of always being a suspect in the murders around her, Mallory jumps at the chance to be the only human on the newly arrived alien space station with the hope that her curse of being a murder magnet only applies to humans. But when more humans arrive, her peace is quickly shattered by, you guessed it, murder.

“’Miracles happen daily if we just open ourselves to it,’ one priest had said while she was in confession. He hadn’t wanted to call it a miracle when, while hearing Mallory’s confession, a parishioner had been murdered in the church’s parking lot. The church had not admitted she was right; they instead accused her of orchestrating the crime. This was her ninth murder and she should have known better.

It was hard to keep track of things though. I wasn’t expecting the story to be non-chronological, and it made things murky. Then, a little before the halfway point, the plot started to spread out and feel really messy. There were suddenly extra POVs added in without zero explanation of who those people were or how they connected to the story. And sometimes there were little internal monologue flashback type scenes about character background as well. It made things too hard to follow.

Mallory was sympathetic but also lacking in personality. The male lead was kind of a jerk to her. Basically, he had a crush on her in college and got pissy when she no longer lived up to his imaginings of how she should behave. The story spent too long dragging out whether or not their romance would develop, and frankly I was not interested in that part of the story at all.

I also got annoyed by the overuse of the miscommunication trope and keeping secrets for the obvious purpose of dragging out the reveals/twists. I'm not sure what the exact number is, but I have a limit of how many times a story can allude to a secret without revealing it before I get really pissed off. And there were far too many "he really needed to tell her his secret but was afraid she'd hate him when she found out," and "he knew he should tell her the secret but was afraid it would put her in more danger." (Not verbatim quotes but similar phrasing was used repeatedly.) That tactic of mentioning a secret repeatedly before revealing it inevitably leads to large amounts of annoyance followed by disappointment when the secret was revealed in a most anticlimactic way.

So by the middle, I was struggling to stay engaged. It just introduced too many new characters and subplots at once that made the whole thing messy and hard to follow. Plus the dialogue was awkward. The series does have potential, but between the many things that annoyed me and my mediocre response to the other book I read by this author, I’m not sure I’ll continue with the series.


RATING FACTORS:
Ease of Reading: 4 Stars
Writing Style: 3 Stars
Characters and Character Development: 2 Stars
Plot Structure and Development: 3 Stars
Level of Captivation: 2 Stars
Originality: 4 Stars

"Your princess is here, and she's fucking metal!" This book was kind of a mess. I love sci-fi, and the premise of a murder mystery aboard a literal space station had me all sorts of curious and cautiously excited. I guess I was picturing a Holmes-ian mystery in a Deep Space Nine or Babylon 5 episode when I picked this up. This was....definitely not that. Mallory has lived her life constantly on the run from murders that happen around her. From a young age, she's borne witness to murder after murder from people around her, and she's had enough. First contact with aliens has come and gone, and Mallory makes her destination the one place humans can't go--Station Eternity. But even after being there doesn't save her when the sentient station starts accepting more humans, and all her past trauma comes back with a vengeance. This was an incredibly convoluted story, made worse with the inclusion of the backstories of nearly everybody around her. Full chapters are dedicated to how a character got to the station, and not all of it was relevant. There was also lots of infodumps disguised as dialogue which really dragged things out in places. I also felt like the later scenes weren't exactly coherent in what they were supposed to get across. (subplot/backup character spoilers)(view spoiler)[Particularly where it involved the Gneiss's...Gneissi? Gneissus? Stephanie, Tina, and Ferdinand. Late in the book we get a plot dump about these rock-like aliens turning into...space ships and things? And there's this sideplot involving Stephanie and her grandfather/ship being at odds with one another that comes to a head in the middle of the murder investigation plot that felt unnecessary. (hide spoiler)] Things just felt incredibly chaotic near the end. Finally, (end spoilers here) (view spoiler)[there just wasn't a lot of murder investigation. Mallory clearly has been through this before and a lot is made of her investigatory skills early on, but the only real investigation she does is get stung by a hornet and realize her aunt is the murderer. Everything else is just a lot of chaotic flailing and dialogue. (hide spoiler)] So, I guess, in short, this wasn't exactly what I was looking for. I thought the premise was interesting and potentially rewarding, but we didn't get any of that delicious payoff. Kind of a letdown, honestly.

So what if you actually were a small-town resident who kept on having people get murdered in her vicinity? Lafferty takes this premise and shifts it to a space station where Mallory Viridian has taken refuge: there are only two other humans there, and she has very little contact with either. But when a shuttle is sent and there's an accident while the station herself is in some disarray due to the murder of her symbiont, well. Lafferty takes the locked room mystery to a whole different level with Station Eternity and it looks as if it's poised to become a series, what with a couple of big unanswered questions at the end...