Chaos Terminal (The Midsolar Murders Book 2) by Mur Lafferty (book review).

Mallory Veridian has opened a detective agency on Station Eternity. She did move as far away from humans as she could by leaving Earth to live alone on a sentient space station because of all the people that kept being murdered in her vicinity and having to solve it, but a girl has got to make a living. Who knew that regular investigations would be so boring and difficult. Alien crimes done by aliens to aliens can also be bizarrely confusing. How was she meant to find someone’s lost day? To make things worse she has picked up some sort of space flu or something and is most definitely not firing on all cylinders. So a second sanctioned shuttle arriving from Earth does not have her excited.

The new human ambassador is coming to take over after the old ambassador’s disastrous attempt to take over the station. Resigned to a boring evening of speech making, Mallory is not at all surprised to find she has connections to some of the other passengers. That’s the way her life works. The law enforcement agent that basically hounded her from Earth is bad enough but her high-school best friend and her teenage crush is adding insult to injury.

Then a passenger is found murdered and stuffed in a closet. No one on the station is shocked except the newly arrived humans. What does shock Mallory and her friends is finding the scattered corpses of the insect-like Sundry just as the station has started responding to queries with ‘everything is fine’. Even as the stars outside begin to look a bit different. This is not a good time for Mallory to be off her deduction game.

‘Chaos Terminal’ is the sequel to ‘Station Eternity’ (which I reviewed back in October 2022) and continues Mallory’s adventures almost right where they left off.

Xan is depressed because the shuttle Infinity he is symbiotically bound to has gone off with Mrs. Brown, the station’s partner, to learn about sentient stations. Mallory feels that she has come to terms with her little ‘murder issue’ and is far away from any humans that would prevent her from taking a job in law enforcement and is fine with Mrs. Brown leaving her in ‘charge’ of Station Eternity. Tina has been crowned queen of a prison planet and has come to Eternity to escape her punishment for the things she did with human corpses in book 1. While Mallory is still the main protagonist, I feel that Xan steps up in this mystery.

His attempts at herding the various aliens and humans in directions that do not lead to explosive decompression are full of sighs and resignation that will really speak to anyone who has ever had to lead a team. As with many good murder mysteries, the sub-plots of most characters do come together in the end to shape the whole and, once again, I was impressed with Lafferty’s way of presenting so many different alien cultures so easily without resorting to exposition.

A new ambassador and a disgruntled former ambassador. Over-enthusiastic rock-aliens. Rogue etymologists. Barely trained CIA agents who are really quantum physicists whose only training is in flirting. It sounds like this book should be a farce and described as ‘wacky’ or ‘zany’ and maybe it is, a little, but it doesn’t give me the negative vibes that reading ‘zany’ on a book jacket would give me. Every bizarre step in the chaos swirl is perfectly reasonable for each of the characters involved and, when you add that to the confusion of a universal translator that translates the words but not the tone, it’s surprising that more crazy doesn’t spring up unannounced.

I love this series. Yes, it’s only two books long so barely a series, but I’m happy to take the future books on faith. If you’ve read and like book one, you will like book two. If you haven’t read book one, I would suggest reading that one first. You could muddle through if you wanted to but there is a lot of world-building with multiple alien races and many individual motivations that might be a little much all at once. There is no ‘previously on the Midsolar Murders’ to orientate you. I’m going to reread book one now to make sure I got all the connections I think I did in book two.

A wonderfully read, it was so easy to sink into the story and the chaos surrounding Mallory and her friends on Station Eternity. If you like the lighter side of Science Fiction, such as ‘A Long Way To A Small Angry Planet’ by Becky Chambers or John Scalzi’s lighter novels like ‘The Kaiju Protection Society,’ try the Midsolar Murders. Especially if you like shows like ‘Midsomer Murders’, too. These are going on my Christmas shopping list.

LK Richardson

November 2023

(pub: Ace Books/Penguin/Random House, 2023. 384 page small enlarged paperback. Price: $17.00 (US), £$14.00 (UK). ISBN: 978-0-59309-813-4)

check out website: www.penguin.com