This is a super adorable cozy mystery with a fun science fiction twist! Murder by Memory is a fun read and a fresh idea from Olivia Waite

A short but quick murder mystery novella, Murder by Memory is an exciting Science Fiction read. I liked how the idea of downloading consciousness into a body like a computer USB drive was utilized in this book. It made for an interesting approach to a murder mystery, especially when the body that the detective is operating is a suspect as well! A perfect weekend read all around. A big thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for gifting me an eARC in exchange for my thoughts. I would definitely recommend this book to those who enjoy murder mysteries with a sci-fi twist!

Murder by Memory was a quick and fun read, navigating the cozy mystery taking place aboard a royal passenger liner. Dorothy (main character) is a delightful narrator and detective, helping us navigate the twisty turns that the mystery takes as she seeks to figure out what exactly is going on. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance copy.

This is a 10-chapter SF noir mystery with a tiny little budding romance subplot, and I loved every bit of it.

Dorothy is a detective on a sentient spaceship. Immortality has been achieved, as the residents of the ship can record their memories in "books" and are reborn after their deaths in new, healthy bodies. Except that as this book takes place, Dorothy has just been reborn in someone else's body - someone whose memory book has been erased, and who can no longer be reborn. Dorothy does what she does best and investigates the crime, meeting the victim's friends and colleagues, discovering clues and reestablishing her own relationships, and even encountering the femme fatale to her noir PI.

I loved the melding of noir detective novel and SF tropes! Even though this was short form fiction, every word was perfectly chosen and the ending was very satisfying. I'd love to read another book set on the ship ... perhaps a series of detective stories featuring Dorothy? This was great.

This objective review is based on a complimentary copy of the novel.

Waite's cozy, queer scifi mystery completely delivers on the Becky Chambers and the senior amateur sleuth vibes. The mystery is set on a fascinating ship. which is on a centuries-long interstellar voyage, where passengers' consciousness can be downloaded into fresh bodies whenever is needed. Our ship detective, Dorothy Gentleman, finds herself in a body that is most definitely not her own and awakes to investigate a murder that is mysterious connected to the body she is inhabiting. I found the scifi setting to be accessible and incredibly intriguing. The mystery is intricate and kept the pages turning. I also love that Waite's world is queer normative without making it a big deal. Dorothy is a delight as an investigator, and traveling the space lanes along beside her and laughing at her witty, wry humor is a blast. I can't wait to solve more mysteries along with her in this series.

Many thanks to Netgalley, Tor/Macmillan for an advanced reader's copy of the book.

Free ARC provided by Tor Publishing Group via Netgalley in exchange for a fair review. Publishing March 18th, 2025.

I've been aware of Olivia Waite's sapphic historicals for a while now, but never quite got around to reading them. I was intrigued to see that her next novella was set to be a SF space mystery. In Murder by Memory, Dorothy Gentleman is a ship's detective for a generation ship on a thousand year voyage. She wakes when her memories are unexpectedly downloaded into the wrong body--a body that seems to be curiously entangled in a murder that's just been committed...

Murder by Memory strongly reminded me of Lafferty's Six Wakes by way of PG Wodehouse. It felt like a murder mystery starring one of the aunts from the Jeeves and Wooster books through Dorothy Gentleman's observations of her troublesome nephew Ruthie and his butleresque boyfriend John. Which is not to say that Dorothy isn't very much her own person and the star of the show, with her no-nonsense sensibility, her love of knitting, and her strong somatic memories of being an old and disabled lady not so long ago.

The mystery itself, concerning an unconvincing body and an attempt to erase people's memory from storage, is satisfyingly twisty. Due to the limited space of a novella, it's perhaps resolved a bit too quickly and easily, but hyper-competent detectives are fairly standard for the genre. It's clear that this is meant to be a series of novellas about Dorothy's exploits, including an ongoing sapphic romance that's just barely set up here, and I for one look forward to reading them.

A sharp and snappy mystery novella with a compelling protagonist set on a sentient AI generation ship. I very much look forward to the sequel, and I'll probably check out Waite's backlist as well.

I'm not usually one for comps but this one has some great ones: mix Mimicking of Known Success, Blighted Stars, and A Memory Called Empire, notch up the fun and add some cozy, and you have Murder by Memory. This is an excellent SF novella and cozy murder mystery.

Olivia Waite is known for her sapphic historical romances, but this is now my favorite of her books. She gives us just enough worldbuilding to familiarize us with her world, but not so much to bog down the 112 or so pages. Dorothy is a detective on a generations ship of ten thousand. At roughly year 300, they've each lived so many lives in recycled bodies but with memories preserved. Dorothy is awakened by the ship, in a body not one of her usual choosing, and she's ready to investigate a death. In the process, she uncovers something that runs much much deeper.

This book is successful because Waite pays attention to the right level of detail at the right time throughout the narrative, delivering an incredibly well balanced novella. We get some reflection on human nature along the way, too. I would like 15 more of these please!

Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite, an enjoyable well written book. An interesting premise that draws you in and good writing that makes you want to keep reading.

Gay sci fi cozy mystery? Yes, yes, yes. This story of immortal aunt detective in space is fun, cozy, and just a touch noir-y. My only complaint is that there’s no knitting pattern for the fern-inspired shawl. (And that there isn’t a bevy of follow-up stories immediately available.)

Dorothy Gentleman is a ship's detective aboard the spaceship Fairweather, taking humans from Earth, light-years forward into the future. Everyone on the ship had a body and a copy of their mind in the Library. When the body wore out (or was fatally injured), you could have your book-mind decanted into a new body. Except Dorothy wakes up at the beginning of the book in someone else's body. How she got there and what that person had been doing--naturally it was nefarious--makes for a very interesting whodunit. I loved the mix of mystery and sci-fi as well as the intriguing characters and various plot twists that keep the reader guessing until the end. What a fun read!

My word.

This is my first book of 2025, and it couldn’t have been a better choice.

It was A DELIGHT.

I loved the Cruise-Ship to Earth 2.0 setting, and the memory/body premise – particularly the bits about memory cocktails.

I loved the characters, and I can’t wait to learn more about then (I’m looking at you, John).

It super-ha-ha-clever.

It was super-building-worlds-clever.

It was super-philosophical-books-are-fucking-political-clever.

I can only hope #2 follows closely behind.

Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite

Generation ship? Cozy mystery? Auntie detective who knits? Sold!

I am a big fan of generation ship stories, so I was intrigued when I saw Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite on NetGalley and I was very happy to be granted an advanced reader copy by the publisher. This book was a lot of fun, but suffered for its short length. The world building was very interesting – unlike many generation ships, the technology on this ship allowed people to be reborn into newly created bodies, so each generation could be comprised of the same individuals. In addition, if someone wanted to take a “rest” from existing, their mind maps could be stored in a library until they felt like coming back. There are so many things built into these concepts that didn’t have room to breathe because this was just a Novella. I thought the drunk computer concept at the beginning was a little weak, but otherwise I thoroughly enjoyed this book and hope that this author writes more in this setting.

What an absolute little delight of a sci-fi mystery novella. I love Olivia Waite's romances, which is why I picked this up in the first place, but this scratched an itch I didn't know I had. Absolutely adored it.

Murdering Memory and Sense

“Becky Chambers meets Miss Marple in this sci-fi ode to the cozy mystery, helmed by a formidable no-nonsense auntie of a detective.” There is a tradition in pop-fiction of defining new works by offering names of past writers or works that these are clones of. Apparently by cloning two previous projects something “new” is born. In this case, the reference is to Becky Chambers, the author of solarpunk Hugo-award-winning novels. A couple of her novels were published with Tor. Characteristically for Tor, Becky tends to write quirky stories about sentient robots. And Miss Jane Marple is a character in Agatha Christie’s fiction, who is an amateur consulting detective. Ah, yes, now I understand the term “sci-fi… cozy mystery”. It took me a bit of research. Olivia Wait, the author of this new novel, is known for her queer romance novels. This might be one of her first ventures into science fiction. She also has the benefit of being NYT Book Review’s columnist in the romance genre. It is a curious leap to go from romance into sci-fi. There is very little romance in this one. No breasts or bulges. The first mention of a “chest” appears in: “wind tossed my wet hair back from my face and thunder rumbled a pass note I felt deep in my chest.”
“A mind is a terrible thing to erase… 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.” The reference to mind-erasure is not metaphorical. A few pages into the book, the first-person narrator is told: “Your memory-book got erased!” Just unlike in other cases, she was still “here”, whereas others whose minds were taken apparently disappear. This is a popular trope in recent novels: the idea of mind-trading and wind-wiping. It seems these are references to amnesia, or brain-transplants. The drama is usually about some of the old consciousness returning, or of a mind managing to survive, as in this case, without being harmed by a wipe. I don’t understand the appeal of this mind-wiping sci-fi proposal. Why is it dramatic that people are being turned into amnesia patients for rich people to take over their bodies? I mean, in reality, these rich people would need to transplant their old brain onto a young body, but an old brain is more prone to strokes etc., so it would probably still die by the age 90-100 for the brain. A young body can’t stop the deterioration from aging of an old brain… I guess it is a scary idea, which is what sci-fi is all about. Find something that scares a lot of people and then use it to keep people in suspense because they are afraid for the characters. This particular character focuses on what she has in her pockets, upon realizing her mind has been switched into another’s body, that of Gloria, a 27-year-old single. Some dark humor is used to help lighten the monotony. The place the spaceship is going to is “Whatever-We’ll-Call-It”, and the departure from a previous body is called being “shelved”. This is probably what works for me in fantasy fiction: they either must be darkly humorous, or extremely dark with twisted narratives of superhuman domination. I think I could get into this novel by focusing on these little jokes that appear in most paragraphs.
“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.” Searching for “Library” led to theories that storms might be creating a problem, or “certain kinds of light” affect the Library, and allow for the creation of “a tool in a standard retromat” (tool that helps generate random plans: this seems unrelated to the thing described) to “erase an entire memory-book.” The idea is to erase a book, instead of writing “over” it. This all seems to be rather nonsensical. But at least this author is trying to explain it, unlike other authors who just blame a vague “state” or “cult”.
“Dorothy suspects her misfortune is partly the fault of her feckless nephew Ruthie who, despite his brilliance as a programmer, leaves chaos in his cheerful wake.” I tried searching for “Ruthie” to learn more about this character. All mentions were general. None referred to programming. I searched for “program”, and no variants of this term appear in this book. Though there are only 76 pages in this review version I received, perhaps the programming is done in an unincluded later section. Either way, that’s strange. Why would this blurb mention that he is a “programmer”, if this side of him is never discussed in the interior? A few dozen pages into the book, there is an explanation that Ruthie thinks “the first magnetic storm did it” (the glitch they are researching) “at random”. And Ruthie has been working to manipulate this glitch to take advantage of it… This kind of explains something… But not enough to focus the interest of a wavered reader.
“Or perhaps the sultry yarn store proprietor―and ex-girlfriend of the body Dorothy is currently inhabiting―knows more than she’s letting on.” Following this storyline helped me come across the romance component I thought was missing from this novel. While describing Violet’s yarn store, the narrative stalls on “Janet’s love for Evelyn”, and on the narrator knowing how much it hurts to “lose love”. These abstractions on love themes echo without much substance, as its unclear who loves whom and why, or why this is relevant to the story about mind-switching. This love section is not funny, which makes it uniquely bad.
“Whatever it is,” (this matches the sentiment throughout: the author/narrator is not seriously trying to solve anything, but is rather stumbling from one thought to the next, with a “whatever” attitude) “Dorothy intends to solve this case. Because someone has done the impossible and found a way to make murder on the Fairweather a very permanent state indeed. A mastermind may be at work―and if so, they’ve had three hundred years to perfect their schemes…” There is no “mastermind” that I could find: only confusion. For a writer to claim a “mastermind” character is at work, a novel must reveal a rational, complex plan this mastermind has designed. Simply refusing to say what the “secret” is until the end, and then making this secret something simple is not sufficient to self-puff a character as masterful.
I couldn’t read much more of this novel, even if somebody paid me to edit it…
—Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Fall 2024: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-fall-2024

Dorothy wakes up in a body that isn't hers. She's much younger than she should be and it feels all wrong. The interstellar passenger liner has been in space for hundreds of years, and technology allows consciousness to be stored, even as bodies fail. When the person is ready, another body is available. But what if someone is trying to get rid of the consciousness as well as the body?

As Dorothy, a detective, unwinds the mystery of her sudden wakefulness, she also has to solve the mystery of this new body- and where is the consciousness that she be inhabiting it?

This Queer space mystery novella from Olivia Waite is a delight and I can't wait for the next chapter in this adventure!

Can a murder mystery even BE cozy? Is that really a thing? I wouldn't have sought this book out on my own, but the publisher reached out to me to see if I'd like to read it and the blurb caught me. A cozy murder mystery in space? I've been all about sci-fi lately, so I decided sure, I'll read this.

This is a surprisingly twisty story for such a short one. This book is a novella and the metadata provided by the publisher says it's 112 pages. The author wastes no time explaining more than the reader needs to know. Dorothy Gentleman is a detective. She is on a space ship. Her mind has been sleeping for some time and she has found herself in someone else's body because of an emergency.

There has been a murder.

Where is the ship going? Not important; we don't know. Why did it leave Earth? Also not important. What is important is that the ship is essentially a mini-city in which its inhabitants live out their many lives and go about their business. When their generated fleshy body dies, their mind is stored in a Book in the Library. The Book isn't a book as we'd think of it, but more of a glass case that holds the mind's memories. A resident can take a break and stay in the Library, essentially sleeping, or they can wait the requisite two days for a new flesh bag to be generated by the ship and return to their business.

Of course, anyone who has lived through any or all of cloud saves, Blu-Rays, DVDs, CDs, VHS and cassette tapes knows that data can also be destroyed. What happens when it does? Is it murder if you kill a body when the mind still exists? Is it still murder if you destroy the mind or is it something bigger? Something worse?

And what reason does a person have for murder when all their needs are being met?

If you want answers to these, and other questions, you'll be able to pick up this short and deadly little tale on March 18, 2025.

Interesting concept. How do you get a new body. What happens to your memories. Why would you wake in the wrong body. Great world building plot development and character development. Kept me guessing,

This was cute! I think perhaps the cozy genre just isn't for me so I don't want to fault this book. The vibes were nice and it was interesting reading a cozy sci fi/mystery as I've only really engaged with cozy fantasy or cozy mystery.

4.5 stars

A cozy murder mystery set on a spaceship that felt a lot like "Spare Man" by Kowal. On what would otherwise be called a generation ship, on this ship, bodies are reformed and their memories come from their stored 'book' in the library. This allows them to live many lifetimes, preserving their skills and memories until their final destination. Several hundred years in, a murder of a body and the erasure of books in the library have detective Dorothy Gentleman on the trail. I'll not give away the details, but I really enjoyed the plot.

The universe Waite has created is interesting, but with this short novella, there is a lot left unexplained. I was wishing for a longer story both to more fully explore the universe and for the mystery to be a little more drawn out. Looking forward to the next in the series.

I really enjoyed this! It took me a bit to get settled into the world building, but I think that's pretty typical of a Sci-Fi book that needs to establish the how for the story to make sense. I loved the cozy aspect and really hope I can use this in my library's sci-Fi book club once it's out in the world. If anything, I' have loved it to be a bit longer. I hope Waite continues it as a series and we get more of all of these characters.