2026 Book Review #20 – Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite
I make a point of reading every novel and novella that gets nominated for the Hugo Award, out of vague aspirations of keeping up with the state of the genre and of having an informed opinion when it comes time to vote. Nominees for 2026 are out, and this was the first of them to become available at the library. It’s a fun bit of fluff – the enjoyable read of an afternoon, but not one I’d feel terribly deprived for missing out on, and not one that would have stayed in my thoughts once I’d set it down if I wasn’t committed to writing these reviews.
The Fairweather is a palatial and luxurious interstellar liner, carrying its crew and passengers on a 300-year journey to their new home in the finest possible style. Included with a ticket is the next-best-thing to immortality, with consciousness and memory regularly backed up and reincarnated into a newly grown body as soon as the last iteration keels over. Or at least, that’s what’s supposed to happen. Which leaves Dorothy Gentleman, ship’s detective, quite nonplussed as she suddenly pops into awareness halfway through an elevator ride and in a body that is not even slightly her own. In short order she finds herself investigating a murder and an elaborate sabotage of the memory banks to actually make it stick – all made much messier by her having involuntarily commandeered the body of the only witness.
This is a self-consciously cozy book, both in the sense it’s meant in wider genre spaces and (I believe) in the sense of specifically a cozy mystery. The marketing copy calls out Becky Chambers and Miss Marple as appropriate comparisons, and provides exactly what you’d expect from this. Despite the murders, it’s a relaxing read without anything in the way of real tension or moments of danger. The appeal of the story is rather quirky, endearing characters, an interesting setting, and watching someone who knows what they’re doing peel apart a rather byzantine mystery.
The mystery itself didn’t really work for me, admittedly. This is self-evidently a book with ambitions of launching a series, and so much of its (very limited) wordcount was spent explaining the setting and introducing the to-be-recurring cast there wasn’t much left to give it the breathing room it probably needed. That the financial machinations and fraud at the heart of it made no sense at all when you thought about them and the murderer’s motives were incredibly broadly sketched didn’t help, but mostly I just didn’t care enough to stay invested as worldbuilding elements were introduced exactly as they helped explain or solve things again. Everything’s tied up neatly in the end, except for setting up one rival/future love interest for the sequels.
I can’t begrudge the use of wordcount too much, as the setting’s far more interesting than the plot anyway. Both for what it is and what it isn’t.
The character of Dorothy is clearly as direct a riff off Miss Marple as you can get away with, but the Fairweather has more in common with Jeeves and Wooster’s milieu than any cozily remote rural villages. Which is to say, it is clearly and consciously written as a cultural shadow of the late British Empire, but a much more bohemian and upper-middle-class (and metropolitan) section of it. The culture really feels very... fannish? If this was the 2010s I’d say ‘steampunky’. A romantic, exaggerated reflection of late-imperial Britain where all the drudge work and toil (and existence of a working class generally, really) has been automated away, and everyone is a gentleman tinkerer or runs an atelier or is a fancy bartender (and bigotry of all kinds is nonexistent and to a first approximation literally everyone seems to be some flavour of queer). It’s really kind of fascinating as a cultural vision to worry away at, though of course a large fraction of all that just comes inherent with modern cozy genre fiction.
The setting’s – and story’s – big hook is of course that everyone’s basically immortal (the book is resolutely uninterested in philosophical questions about transhumanism and continuity of consciousness). With the partial exception of some theorizing about the villain’s plots, a few generations of this have had less of an effect on anyone’s perspectives on life or morality than you would expect, but the book has a great deal of fun talking about the logistics and cultural rituals that have developed around it.
Overall, inoffensive and a decent way to kill some time in much the same way as a weekly mystery procedural on TV. Part of me wishes it had been far more interested in how bizarre and fiendishly complicated a murder mystery involving clones, consciousness transfers and digital immortality can be – something more akin to Six Wakes or the Jean le Flambeur trilogy – but I can hardly blame the book for not being something entirely different than it is. I don’t feel any real pressing need to go looking for the first already-published sequel, but I won’t resent it if I end up reading it for something.
