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. Continue reading Review of Nobody’s Baby—An Anti-Murder Mystery
Tag: Olivia Waite
Review of Murder by Memory—Cozy Sci-fi
The “cozy” label for subgenres has been tossed around a lot lately, ever since the success of Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes series kicked off a fervor for “cozy fantasy” and discourse began over what other genres might get in on the hype. But Olivia Waite takes the term right back to its roots by simply transposing the tropes and trappings of the original cozy genre—cozy mystery—onto a science fiction setting. I’ve found for several years now that Olivia Waite’s historical romance novels (like The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows and The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics) make for perfect comfort reading. So though Murder by Memory is her first foray into both sci-fi and mystery, I believe, it’s no surprise that she would find her home amongst the cozy. This bite-sized novella (it’s barely one hundred pages) came out last month and appears to be the first in a series, so I look forward to seeing cozy sci-fi become a growing trend. Continue reading Review of Murder by Memory—Cozy Sci-fi