I loved Murder by Memory! It was a very different reading experience than Waite's Feminine Pursuits series, particularly how much worldbuilding there was (memory books, experience cocktails!) in just a few pages. The cozy sci-fi aesthetic with a side of body horror will likely be a hit with fans of Becky Chambers. My only complaint is how short it was, but the plot was wrapped up nicely, I just wanted more time with the characters. I'm particularly excited to get to know our our protagonist better, detective Dorothy Gentleman, and seeing how her relationships develop as the series goes on!

Dorothy Gentleman is a passenger on the HMS Fairweather, a ship traveling through space for centuries on route to settling a new home. To accommodate the long journey, passengers preserve all their memories in the Library, so if their bodies fail, their minds can be added to a healthy body and they are reborn. However, when Dorothy wakes up after a couple of years of voluntary stasis, she finds herself not in her own body… but in someone else’s.

It appears that something damaged Dorothy’s memory book, and as one of the ship’s investigators (and the aunt of one of the ship’s programmers), emergency protocol had her awakened and put in the closest available body. As Dorothy investigates the murder, she finds a number of possible suspects. Things are complicated by the fact that Dorothy doesn’t appear as herself, but as Gloria Vowell, the woman whose body she now inhabits — a woman who has an unexpected connection to the case. Even more frightening, Dorothy learns that the damage to the Library may not have been accidental, but by design. Without the memory books, when someone dies or is killed, there is no way to bring them back. But Dorothy is nothing if not determined, and she is out to find the killer before it is too late.

Ok, so hear me out. Cozy mystery… in space. Awesome, right? I was hooked on this one from the blurb and I think this first book in the Dorothy Gentleman series delivers nicely on its premise. I really enjoyed the way the small-town vibe of many cozies translates to this space ship. We have almost a locked-room scenario, as the killer is obviously aboard the ship, and a lovely older woman who is investigating. Author Olivia Waite really enhances the story with some creative world building. This group is on a journey that will take many lifetimes, so they have sort of a technology-based reincarnation. Old body worn out or injured? Download your memories into a fresh one! But what then happens when those memory books are damaged and there is no way to bring someone back again? The premise not only allows for a creative mystery, but also to explore the idea of mortality. Here is a passage from after Dorothy realizes that someone is unable to be brought back:

I shivered. Gone. It was one thing for a body to die: three hundred years of dying and waking up and dying again had meant all of us were more or less used to the idea of a bodily death at this point. But for a whole person to be gone — all their memories, all their skills, the essence of who they were — for it to be wiped from the record completely, with no way of ever getting it back…

The world building also allows for some clever elements, like the fact that Dorothy is investigating in Gloria’s body, which allows her access and anonymity that often helps her investigation. There is also the fact that Dorothy is an older woman (though I’m not clear on her actual age) and she is temporarily in the body of a much younger one. So suddenly all those aches and pains of age are gone as she lives in this much younger body.

I think the mystery is interesting, and like I said, the world building here allows for a lot of cleverness and unique twists. And I loved the fact that it all takes place on this giant ship. Waite gives a lot of great detail that really brings the setting to life. However, I do think the investigation lacked a little intensity, even for a cozy mystery. There isn’t a lot of action, versus talking through the resolution, as Dorothy learns about the killer and how they accomplished the crime. So even though I didn’t expect high suspense, I did find this was perhaps just a little too relaxed and I wanted a bit more from the climax.

Just for clarity, I wouldn’t consider this a true romance and Dorothy is not involved in a romantic relationship (though that may come further in the series). However, she is a widow who lost her wife in a way that did not allow for her to be brought back in a new body, and Dorothy put herself into a stasis of sorts to give herself some time to recover emotionally. Almost all the side characters of significance are involved in same sex partnerships, so this a cast full of queer characters, including Dorothy’s nephew.

I thought this was a really great start to an interesting new series. I loved Dorothy as our lead and POV character, and the setting and unique world building adds a great twist. I am really excited about this series and looking forward to more.

A solid begging to a new series. I enjoyed reading this quick, fun cozy mystery set in space. The character set up is intriguing and the mystery was well paced. I’m looking forward to future books!

Finished this cozy sci-fi novella in a day! I give it a solid four stars and highly recommend it for anyone looking for a low-stakes mystery and a quick escape from real life.

Dorothy Gentleman is a detective on a ship; an entire city of people bound for an unknown world. The voyage has taken over three centuries, but the passengers keep their memories in a library and can upload those memories to a new body the ship provides when the old one dies. This novella reminded me of one of my favorite episodes of Doctor Who (minus the horrific flesh-eating shadows). When the ship encounters a solar storm, Dorothy wakes up in the body of someone else. There’s been a murder and someone’s shockingly trying to wipe out the memory banks in the library. The relationship between the victim and the body Dorothy’s inhabiting complicates matters, as well as the solar storm cutting Dorothy off from her usual resources. Dorothy really wants to sit down and knit, but nevertheless she‘s determined to solve the murder and find out why someone would want to destroy the memories stored in the library and permanently delete someone.

I recognized Olivia Waite’s name because I read one of her queer historical romances and enjoyed it. Everyone in this book is queer, but sadly the only romance our main character Dorothy’s getting is the heartbreak of her tragic backstory. A few of the side characters do seem to be in healthy and happy relationships, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Olivia Waite might return to this universe and give our ship detective another intriguing mystery and perhaps a second chance at love. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this delightful novella!

Olivia Waite’s Murder by Memory arrives at a peak time for SFF murder mystery, and even more particularly for space murder mystery. If you love this genre as I do, you know that we’ve been blessed with a proliferation of fantastic books along these lines: Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes, Tade Thompson’s Far From the Light of Heaven, Victor Manibo’s Escape Velocity, and S.A. Barnes’s Dead Silence, to name just a few. Murder by Memory enters a thriving field with confidence and aplomb.

Our detective, Dorothy Gentleman, is accustomed to waking up in a fresh body. As a traveler aboard the generation ship Fairweather, she shares certain privileges with the other passengers. Their memories and consciousness will be regularly backed up into memory books, stored in the ship’s library. When they inevitably succumb to old age (or die in some other way), their consciousness will be downloaded into a freshly produced copy of their original body, and they can proceed with another iteration of their life. If they prefer to take a break from living—as who wouldn’t, now and then?—they can elect to keep their consciousness stashed away in the memory book for a few years. After a painful loss, that’s exactly what Dorothy has done. So it’s a bit of a shock to find that she’s been downloaded into a new body ahead of schedule. Worse, it’s not even her body. Worst of all, the person who had the body before her is probably a murderer.

A woman called Janet—the long-time business partner of the body Dorothy finds herself in—is found dead in the aftermath of a magnetic storm that rattled the ship’s systems. Janet appears to have drowned herself in a bathtub full of memory liquor. But Dorothy doesn’t buy it, and her chief suspect is the person whose body she’s walking around in, a woman named Gloria Vowell who had absolutely no business wandering around the ship in the midst of a magnetic storm.

Olivia Waite made her name in historical romance, and she now comes skipping across genre lines with a clear love and enthusiasm for the spaces she’s now writing in: Our detective recalls Dorothy Sayers by name and Miss Marple by nature (complete with a beloved nephew), and a yarn shop—cozy mysteries’ favorite type of business establishment—features prominently. On the SFF side, our background is a generation ship riddled with the morally gray queer folks of which contemporary SFF is so fond. Too, Waite’s got a wonderful eye for details to make her imagined world feel lived in: Our detective remarks that although no light comes in through the windows of each cabin, all the passengers—refugees from Earth—still tend to put their desks below the window, “as if we were careful to leave space in our lives for the weather we never experienced on board ship.”

Despite its brief length, Murder by Memory feels instantly welcoming, its setting and characters at once familiar and unique. Waite’s fully invested in the speculative elements of her novel. The trope of the generation ship is a longtime favorite of mine, because I love it when the characters are stuck with each other and cannot leave (see also: boarding school). Waite has put a fun spin on it by making all the passengers functionally immortal. Imagine being on a very large road trip that lasts your entire life, and then you die and you can finally get away from all those damn people you’re tired of, and then you wake up alive and do the whole thing all over again. And again. And again. Being honest, I’d probably do a murder, too. My defense at the murder trial would be the same defense I use for everything: I am an introvert and a Taurus. No jury on earth would convict.

The biggest clue that Waite is coming from the romance genre is how vividly interested she is in her characters’ experience of embodiment. Dorothy Gentleman keeps being brought up short by her discomfiture at finding herself in a body other than her own. “Imagine going to the washroom to be sick and having someone else’s sick come out,” she thinks, upon first awaking. “I came very close to making this more than a metaphor.” Later, when she realizes that someone has properly, actually, forever died, their memory book wiped from existence along with their working consciousness, she has an acutely physical reaction to the idea. “My stomach—[her host body’s] stomach, oh god—lurched. I had one very bad moment when it felt like my body and my mind were fighting to tear apart from each other.”

On the more pleasant side, if you are into mind-altering experiences (I am not), is the alcohol of choice on board Fairweather, a thing called memory liquor. It was invented as a way to retain specific memories and experiences, even small ones, that might be lost or degraded over the years of travel. “Memories of Earth, the kind we couldn’t make on board the Fairweather, sorted by type and distilled into distinct colors and flavors. You could mix them like any cocktail.” When mixed well, memory liquor creates a distinct somatic experience, more vivid than the kind of memory that takes place purely in the mind. “This,” Dorothy thinks after drinking a cocktail made by a particularly skilled mixologist, “felt like the kind of memory the body carried. ”

Murder by Memory is quite a linear mystery, without much in the way of red herrings or side quests. Dorothy follows clues as they arise and unravels the mystery without too much trouble—though Waite cleverly includes a little spike at the end, to complicate what we thought we knew about some of the characters. But the book leaves alluring hints at what’s to come future installments in the series. We still have plenty to learn about memory liquor, Dorothy’s nephew and his partner, and the yarn shop proprietor—among others—and it’s clear Waite knows more than she’s telling. Wry, strange, and generous, Murder by Memory is a fantastic series opener, with a vivid setting and intriguing characters that leave readers wanting more.

“Everyone on the Fairweather had a book and a body: the Library held a copy of your mind in one while you walked around in the other.”

This is a cozy mystery novella set on a sentient spaceship which has been tasked with transporting humans across the universe over the course of millennia. I found the futuristic sci-fi elements intriguing, especially the concepts of a library of lives and memories as cocktails. I liked Dorothy a lot, especially since she managed to be both a doting aunt and a complex character with her own goals and desires. Also, I have a soft spot for sentient ships and Ferry was delightful.

For me, the appeal of this story had more to do with Dorothy and her life as a detective in space and the realities of a society in which people are essentially immortal than it did with the mystery itself. This was probably partially because the book is very short—more of a novella than a novel. This meant there was only so much time to devote to the crime plot. That being said, I really enjoyed this little book. I’m hoping there will be more Dorothy Gentleman books in the future.

Murder by Memory is a novella that packs a lot into its short length with a mystery set on a generational ship, the Fairweather, where death doesn't have to be the end as long as a person's memories are properly backed up. During an electric storm, Dorothy awakens from a long rest after her previous lifetime, but not in her own body. She is one of the ship's detectives and this case is particularly important since someone is not only killing bodies which can be replaced, but also deleting minds from the storage library. I enjoyed the cozy mystery aspect of the story and also the interesting science fiction world building of the story which includes drinks which can bring to life memories like summer thunderstorms. I hope we see more of Dorothy and the Fairweather in the future. Fan's of Waite's Feminine Pursuits series of historical lesbian romances, The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics, The Hellion's Waltz, and The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows will enjoy the bit of romance that Waite also infuses into her Murder by Memory plot.

Thank you Tordotcom for the gifted copy.

Murder by Memory
Olivia Waite
Publishing Date: March 18, 2025
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This was a really enjoyable Sci-Fi novella. Sci-Fi is not my most read genre so I always love when I step outside my comfort zone and am pleasantly surprised. This is the first book in what will be a series, and plan to check out the next one!

Dorothy is our FMC and is a detective aboard an interstellar passenger liner in space. She wakes up in the wrong body and discovers that someone has been murdered. On top of that, someone is also erasing the memory books that are used to move people from one life to the next.

Read this if you enjoy:
🪐 Space and Science-Filled
🪐 Cozy Mystery
🪐 Locked Room (space craft?)
🪐 Older FMC
🪐 Queer Rep
🪐 Books within a book (Memory Book Library)
🪐 Short Quick Read

A absolutely charming cozy mystery! I thought it was a strong enough sci-fi to keep me, a seasoned sci-fi enthusiast, entertained while still not being too technical to scare off sci-fi novices that are more interesting in the cozy aspect. I found the knitting shop to be an especially fun detail.

Dorothy Gentleman is a passenger on a luxurious interstellar generation ship. She is awakened into a new body by the ship's AI when a murder is committed. As the ship's favorite detective, she is called upon to discover how and why the erasure of the victim's memory was deleted. This is complicated by her erratic nephew and the personal history of her new body. I was especially entertained by the giddy ship AI and was disappointed when it recovered its dignity. This was a delightful cozy mystery--in space! on a luxury liner! It even has a knitting shop. Because when you are travelling for hundreds of years you must have a hobby. This was a quick, fun read. I hope it turns into a series.I would rate this 4 1/2 stars if I could. My only quibble is that it is too short.

Murder by Memory was a home run in my book! Olivia Waite delightfully knits together the comfort of a whodunnit detective tale with the allure of a novel sci-fi setting.

Dorothy Gentleman, our sharp and likable protagonist, is traveling on a spaceship headed for another planet. For the duration of the very lengthy journey, each passenger’s “memory book” is uploaded to the ship and periodically updated, so that passengers can receive new bodies as time passes.

At the beginning of this novella, Dorothy wakes up, not to a new body, but inside the body of a fellow passenger on the spaceship; just as disturbingly, she wakes up to a crime scene. Dorothy begins to investigate, but the situation poses a special challenge when there’s a possibility that the body Dorothy is inhabiting might have committed the crime!

I don’t know what impressed me more— Waite’s fascinating futuristic setting and “memory book” premise, or her very cleverly constructed murder mystery. This mashup was exactly my jam, and I’m psyched that Waite has two sequels in the works!

Highly recommend this yarn to anyone looking for an excellently-written cozy comfort read or a fun mystery to unravel. (I suppose I should mention that Dorothy is a knitter; hence the puns).

Sincere thanks to Tordotcom for the eARC! Murder by Memory is out today.

I found this to be cute and fun but it lacked substance. Would recommend for a quick (!!) cozy mystery with sci-fi aspects in the background.

Thank you to TorDotCom for my review copy. My opinions are my own.

This story tickled a itch that I didn't know that I really had. A sci-fi murder mystery with a detective waking up in a body that isn't theirs. And lies all over the place. I loved the memory drinks, the atmosphere of Ferry, the description of the Library filled with people's books, the idea that you lived your life, then when you died you were uploaded into your new copy body, and so much of little other details (oh and the big details - like the queer normality).

Dorothy Gentleman is a fascinating character and I can't wait to see what hijinks she gets up to in her next installment. Also can I just appreciate the fact that the main character is older, she is in her 50's and still living life, even if it's on a space ship on it's way to a new planet.

Highly recommend!

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
I’ve enjoyed Olivia Waite’s historicals, so I was excited to see her trying something new. While neither sci-fi nor (especially) cozy mystery are favorite genres of mine, I like what Waite brought to this cross-genre story, especially in terms of the world building, and the concept of memory “books” being a vehicle for rebirth after death in a new body, The cozy, sentient spaceship, the HMS Fairweather, was also vividly drawn, and I hope to see more of it in future. While the “cozy mystery” itself was a bit less intriguing to me, combined with these other fun elements, I was drawn in. Dorothy Gentleman is also a solid protagonist, and I loved the sensation of exploring the world through an older person who has regained youth. Generally, a really cool intro to a clever, original series.

I loved Olivia Waite's sapphic Regency romances (the Feminine Pursuits series), so I was intrigued to see this sci-fi novella offering. It's always interesting to see an author do something quite different than their usual.

Murder by Memory gets off to a bit of a slow start, but the plot picked up quickly in this sci fi whodunnit, and left me wondering how the author would fit all the disparate puzzle pieces together in the end. And I adore the little push-and-pull with Violet.

This is book 1 in the Dorothy Gentleman series, and I can't wait to see what comes next!

A cozy sci-fi mystery that will put you in your grandma era.

This story follows a space detective who wakes up in the wrong body. What drew me to this story is the FMC is an older woman and gives real Jessica Fletcher vibes. Our FMC, Dorothy (yes, really that's her name and I LOVE THAT!), finds out that someone is not only killing bodies but purposefully deleting minds from the Library, she realizes something even more sinister is afoot.

We follow Dorothy as she untangles a web of lies and deceit by finding clues on board the giant space ship and eventually identifying the culprit.

Also, we visit a yarn store! Yes, this spaceship has a yarn store, because of course it does.

Pick this up if you love
✨ Cozy sci-fi
✨ Novella
✨Older FMC
✨Queer-normative culture
✨A deep dive on gender, bodies and identity

This book is best read while crocheting in a library, watch out for the murderer.

A cute cozy mystery. Closed room mystery I suppose as it’s set on a generation ship. It’s only novella length but it describes the world well and gives you enough of the main character to make her interesting and feel like a person. I’d read another quite happily.

This is exactly what I love about short fiction. Waite drops the reader into the middle of a complex reality, 100% certain that they will catch up. There is no time to over-explain. And the story! Dorothy is my new favourite sleuth, and this twist on a generation ship is my new favourite setting. Twists and turns, love gone wrong, and the power of human nature to overpower any kind of advancement we could make! It’s a nearly perfect little story that parallels our own reality a little close for comfort: everybody is keeping secrets and some of them can get you killed. 100% will recommend, this us my next staff pick.

#MurderByMemory:⁣
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Thank you @macmillan.audio and @torbooks my for gifted copies! #TorBooks #MacAudio2025⁣
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This is basically everything I’ve ever hoped for and more. Space detective aunt?! I’m so happy to see a #1 in the series because I need like 15 of these immediately. It’s giving a new age sci-fi Agatha Christie. It is a short read, which has me satisfied and yet begging for more. ⁣
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Our girl Dorothy wakes up in a different body. Hold up. She was “shelved” in a library where you can basically get your slumber on in the future. She’s in Gloria’s body, finding out a lot of the shelves have been ruined. Now, who did this and how does she get back in her own body? ⁣
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Audio was perfect. A little under 2 hours, it’s a little bite size snack of locked room mystery!! I’ve been living for my space mysteries and this is no exception! Blair Baker did a wonderful job, and I hope to hear more of Baker as future narrations for the series. ⁣
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Out Tuesday the 18th, I’m really excited to see this one out in the world.

n Murder by Memory, Olivia Waite has created a detective truly of and for this century. Murder by Memory is a queer cozy scifi mystery, and Dorothy Gentleman is our detective. This is the first book in a detective series and I will very happily continue reading this series.

The synopsis of the book: Welcome to the HMS Fairweather, Her Majesty’s most luxurious interstellar passenger liner! Room and board are included, new bodies are graciously provided upon request, and should you desire a rest between lifetimes, your mind shall be most carefully preserved in glass in the Library, shielded from every danger.

Near the topmost deck of an interstellar generation ship, Dorothy Gentleman wakes up in a body that isn’t hers—just as someone else is found murdered. As one of the ship’s detectives, Dorothy usually delights in unraveling the schemes on board the Fairweather, but when she finds that someone is not only killing bodies but purposefully deleting minds from the Library, she realizes something even more sinister is afoot.

The characters in this book are smart, the setting is very cool as is the premise. I really enjoyed this lock room mystery. I need to thank Orbit Books and Net Galley for my arc.