Rogue Protocol (Murderbot #3)
Exit Strategy (Murderbot #4)
Fugitive Telemetry (Murderbot #6)
I never know what to say about these books. I like them. Are they all the same? Yeah, kind of. Is that a bad thing? No, not really. Murderbot goes places, Murderbot investigates, Murderbot is awkward around humans. It’s like a cozy mystery set in space. I liked Fugitive Telemetry most, because it’s where we get the most interaction between Murderbot, the people who know him, and those who meet him for the first time. He’s beginning to learn. I’m feeling proud of him in a very maternal way.
I also like how Murderbot seems to grow as a character as he gets closer to humans, and starts feeling more at ease with them. Murderbot was never allowed to sit down before it hacked itself, and now the first thing it does when it goes anywhere is fling itself down on a sofa (I’m still waiting to see if it props its feet on the coffee table, too). Murderbot also develops strong opinions on people, good or bad, and occasionally screws up (though the novels stray dangerously into that territory where the main character is right all the time and therefore annoying, but we haven’t reached that point yet. So far, I really like Murderbot.
Which is more than I can say for the characters of the other book I read this week.
No-one Was Supposed To Die At This Wedding – Catherine Mack
Alright, so this book is about murder, but sadly lacking in the -bot department.
Author Eleanor Dash has been invited to the wedding of her best friend and famous actress Emma Wood (get it? Eleanor Dashwood and Emma? Jane Austen? It’s not on the nose or anything). Emma is marrying Fred West. The fact that he shares his name with a serial killer is… A choice. I was half expecting his best man to be called James ‘Jimmy’ Savile.
Anyhoodle, Eleanor heads off with her fiancé Oliver, her sister Harper and her frenemy slash erstwhile sex buddy person Connor (there’s a lot of backstory, all of it needlessly complicated, none of it interesting) to the Catalina Island in spite of a hurricane warning. She isn’t just there as a friend, maid of honor, cross your heart and hope to die kind of person, but also to investigate the threatening notes and social media posts that Emma has received. Because you would definitely call a romance writer to do that instead of the cops or a private investigator. Soon, odd things start to happen at the island.
I’ll be honest: I checked out of this novel pretty fast and skipped through the last half. It has a concept that, in the right hands, might have been interesting: Eleanor pretends to be the one writing her own book. It’s all very meta. There are footnotes, which is fucking annoying in ebook format. It’s one of those novels that aims for whimsy, shoots straight past it, trips over its own feet and lands feet-first into a big pile of tropes and clichés. There is a lot going on and it’s hard to keep track of. The murder mystery itself is pretty badly conceived; half the assassination attempts are so dumb that nobody would attempt them, let alone fall for them, and it’s high on the it-doesn’t-work-that-way-scale, both on technical details and just on the general way Hollywood and the publishing industry conduct themselves.
All of that I could forgive, but this book is so damn convoluted and the characters are so damn shrill that I thought back wistfully to Murderbot. Someone should have invited him to the wedding. He’d have sorted it out in no time.