I picked up Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Spare Man up for no other reason than it was on sale and I liked the cover. It’s got this sort of retro-futuristic vibe that spoke to me (and essentially said “read me”).
Tesla Crane is a famous heiress, inventor, and survivor of a corporate science disaster. She and her new spouse, Shal—a retired detective, are honeymooning on an interplanetary cruise liner from the Moon to Mars, when they chance upon a murder-in-progress. Shal becomes the prime suspect and is detained by the ship’s security, leaving Tesla (with the help of her service dog), to free him and discover the real murderer.
I wanted to like this so much more than I actually did. The world Kowal creates is great, and the space cruise ship setting is interesting for a murder mystery (and I loved the detail that towel animals on cruises are still very much a thing in the future). However, there was a lot of things that didn’t really come together as I’d hoped.
Tesla has flashes of brilliance, but mostly she solves her problems by being rich and calling her lawyer. Shal is sort of a Sherlock-Holmes style character, but is so, so bland. There’s a potentially great storyline that’s sort of hinted at, where he feels he needed to retire because he couldn’t do his job effectively because of his newfound fame from being attached to Tesla, but it’s barely hinted at and doesn’t really go anywhere. Their relationship is mostly being snobby together about their drink preferences.
I’m of the opinion that a great mystery book has a resolution that’s both surprising yet inevitable—something that makes you say “ohhh, of course.” The ending to the central mystery in this book instead had me saying “huh?” It just comes out of nowhere, and didn’t really have any emotional impact.
I sound like I’m complaining a lot about this book, but it actually wasn’t terrible. It’s more that I can see it had the potential for me to really like it that makes me more critical than if I’d just hated everything outright.