What’s the opposite of a murder mystery? If murder is the criminal and unexpected loss of life, then the inverse must be the criminal and unexpected creation of life. Detective Dorothy Gentleman investigates just that in the form of a surprise baby among the strictly sterile population of a generation ship in the second installment of Olivia Waite’s new cozy sci-fi mystery series. I reviewed the first book Murder by Memory when it came out last spring. Now Dorothy returns to take on an even stranger case in Nobody’s Baby, which came out last month.
Passage aboard the HMS Fairweather came with strict regulations: passengers will survive the multi-century journey to a new star system by uploading their consciousness into a memory-book so that they can be redownloaded into new bodies whenever age, sickness, or other ill-fortune catches up with them—essentially making everyone immortal for the duration of the trip. But in order to keep the population from exponentially expanding, naturally all fertility must be put on pause. So where did the baby on Ruthie’s doorstep come from? When ship’s detective Dorothy Gentleman receives a series of frantic texts from her nephew, she realizes they’ve got a bigger problem than just relearning how to care for an infant for the first time in over three centuries. She’ll need to uncover not just who the baby’s parents are but also how they managed to get around the biological safeguards, whether they did so on purpose, and why the baby was suddenly abandoned. What starts off as a miracle soon leads to a web of secrets, lies, legal loopholes, and maybe even murder.
Olivia Waite, a celebrated romance author now blending the cozy mystery genre with space sci-fi, is a master at turning genre expectations on their head. Most traditional mysteries, even of the cozy variety, center on a murder. In her first Dorothy Gentleman book, Waite softens this premise by creating a world where murder isn’t permanent as long as one’s consciousness can be downloaded into a new body—but then raises the stakes again by threatening the Library where memory-books are stored. Here, she replaces murder with a much more cozy premise: an unexpected baby. But as Dorothy investigates, the crimes she uncovers continue to escalate: from abandonment of a child to attempted kidnapping, erasing memories, and in fact a murder, after all. Though this series ultimately promises a feel-good read, that doesn’t mean there won’t be serious crimes and some heavy topics along the way. And though it trods some well-known genre tropes, it’s by no means predictable!
Perhaps the biggest crime in this story is one that hasn’t happened yet and which Dorothy works desperately to prevent: the crime of failing to treat baby Peregrine as a full citizen, since he doesn’t fit neatly into the existing bylaws of the Fairweather. Beyond unraveling the mystery of how Peregrine came to be, Dorothy takes on the additional responsibility of what to do with him in the future. There are some among her detective colleagues who regard the baby’s mere existence as a crime and want to follow the ship protocols for stowaways or frauds, or else regard him as some sort of contraband automaton. Alternatively, they can follow the legal guidelines set out for when their society makes landfall on a new planet, but then Peregrine would not have the right to a memory-book and essential immortality like the other passengers. In order to follow her conscience, Dorothy must reexamine her relationship to the law. Must they define the baby within the narrow confines of preestablished laws, or is it okay to bend the rules?
For a quick little novella, Nobody’s Baby asks plenty of thought-provoking questions from both a crime and sci-fi angle, proving that “cozy” doesn’t necessarily mean “brain candy.” The Dorothy Gentleman books are shaping up to be a delightful series that I would recommend to readers across genres. You can find Nobody’s Baby on shelves now at your favorite local retailer or buy it online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. If you’ve already read it, let me know your thoughts in the comments!