Some more chaotic sleuthing for Pleiti and Mossa.

As usual, academia is cutthroat and one of Pleiti's friends is in danger. Mossa is distant and their relationship is strained. This mystery definitely had the strings on a bulletin board vibe as they try to solve the mystery, using their observation skills and the obnoxiousness of academical to figure out who the threat is.

I love the world that these books that place in so I keep reading them, but I often find that the mystery deductions are lacking or aren't exciting enough to fully interest me. I found Pleiti's use of the suspects' research papers as a very vague way to whittle down the suspects.

I think this is my favorite so far of the Mossa and Pleiti investigations books.

Think Sherlock Holmes, except sapphic, drenched in academia (classists vs modernists), and set on platforms around Jupiter where humanity lives now after rendering Earth uninhabitable.

In this installment, Mossa (detective and Holmes-equivalent) is depressed and out of the picture for the first half, leaving Pleiti (university professor and Watson-equivalent) on her own to handle the investigation. I really appreciated seeing Pleiti grow confident in herself and her investigating skills. I also really appreciate the Sherlock and Watson undertones and the way Mossa and Pleiti embody their characteristics while still feeling like their own characters.

Besides crafting an engaging mystery and a set of wonderful characters, and a fascinating world for them to inhabit, Malka Older has a wonderful way with words. I love how the characters' vocabulary includes obscure words, references to things from Earth's past and "old sayings" that sometimes get mangled -- like "technobro."

The rivalries between the classicists and the modernists are also quite amusing because the classicists are what one might expect, a little stuffy, studying old texts and whatnot, except the the "old texts" are often from the reader's present and they are trying to use them to extrapolate what a successful mix of plant and animal life to reintroduce to Earth to hopefully recreate liveable conditions there.

The world is incredibly well thought-out and detailed and just feels real.

The audiobook narrator did a great job bringing the characters and events to life and I thoroughly enjoyed listening.

*Thanks to Tor Books for providing an early copy for review.

The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka Older is an excellent continuation of The Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti series. Immersed in this cozy, sapphic space opera is a novella brimming with questions about the human condition and all its complexities. The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses is an engaging mystery that centers a dangerous academic threat that’s right up Pleiti’s alley and needs her specific talents. It was cool seeing Pleiti investigate solo for the first half of this adventure. We get to see her grow and gain confidence in her own abilities and instincts, separate from Mossa, and it was beautiful to see Pleiti realize that, yes, she might not be Mossa, but she is indeed a damn good detective and intellectual. Older employs a great balance of mystery, character growth, humor, and of course romance between Pleiti and Mossa that continues to build on the previous two installations in this series. I’m looking forward to more from The Investigations of Moss and Pleiti.

So this is the third in a mystery series that I can only describe as giving queer Sherlock Holmes vibes. Humanity has spread out to Jupiter due to Earth becoming unlivable, and habitats are orbiting the planet. (We don't learn much about the science behind this. This is absolutely fine, in fact, it reminded me of classic SF – here is the thing, it's enough that you know about the thing for the story.) Pleiti is contacted by a former classmate for help as someone is trying to sabotage the former classmates' academic career.

Academic backbiting never gets old, apparently. Pleiti travels to the habitat without her investigative partner, Mossi and we are plunged into the mystery.

I quite liked this, as I said, it does give off Sherlock Holmes vibes. The mystery is well laid out and I certainly didn't guess whodunnit, which is always nice. Also, I'm 99% sure there was a blink and you missed it Firefly Easter egg, so also fun!

Recommended for Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie fans.

I received an ARC copy from NetGalley in exchange for my honest opinion.

You know what's hard? Dealing with the little parts of our psyche that prevent us from asking for things we need. Also people trying to kill someone in increasingly elaborate ways. Business as usual for Malka Olders's "The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses."

Something is happening on another platform involving Pleti's former classmate cousin. Accusations of plagiarism and odder things. She agrees, but is flying solo this time due to Mossa being in a funk. And then toxic academia happens. My true foe.

Reasons to read:
-One or two lessons on things a lot of us could probably stand to be better at
-A genuinely good person confused at the sniping of others
-Fighting the true monster (I am biased)
-Continuing the meta plot of these novellas

Cons:
-Someone always has to ruin things that would improve society with business

The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses continues the adventures of Mossa and Pleiti in solving mysteries. This novella specifically provides more focus on the relationship between Mossa and Pletia and their difficulties. This is the first mystery in which Pleiti has to work by herself as Mossa has unexpectedly has started to isolate her. I found myself curious about how their relationship will continue to develop in future books. The mystery centers on academic culture with one of Pleiti’s friends from university having been accused of plagiarism. Older does really well at considering the culture of academia and the influence it has on the mystery itself. The characterizations of Mossa and Pletia was well done and I really enjoyed getting to see more of their relationship as it grows and changes. Older also further discusses the culture of the world she’s created and the mental and physical health impact it has. I find that Older is able to crate a world and give enough information for readers to understand it and it is clear that she has a great understand of her world and what is going on in it. Overall, if you enjoy cozy mysteries and science fiction setting I recommend checking out this book and the series. Thank you Netgalley and Tor Publishing Group for providing me with a digital review copy. All opinions within this review are my own.

I can't say enough good things about Older and this series. The writing is crisp and smart. The characters are fully realized and fascinating. The mysteries are compelling. The romantic elements are stunning. The gender, race, class, climate, and justice themes are expert.

Malka Older has captured my heart with this amazing sci-fi mystery series. This is the third book in the series and I have been obsessed with each one. If you're not familiar with the series the setting is one of my favorite parts. This is a post climate disaster world where humans have been driven from earth and have setup a temporary colony on a series of connected platforms, suspended in Jupiter's atmosphere. The first few books go into more detail on how life is lived on a Jupiter colony. The sparseness of resources does mean that life on the platforms has a steampunk sort of vibe. This sudo Edwardian style lends itself to a Sherlockian mystery in so many ways.

Our main characters are Massa, an inscrutable inspector, and Pleiti an academic with a nose for finding trouble. These former classmates are drawn together by a series of mysteries involving the college that Pleiti works for.

I don't want to give too much away as there are two books ahead of this one that one may want to read before starting this one, but I will say that I think Mossa and Pleiti are a great fit for all sorts of readers. This is not the sort of sci-fi that is only for sci-fi readers. Malka is a fantastic writer and I really hope more people in my sci-fi circles find their way to these stories.

I was provided a digital copy of this title in exchange for an honest review.

This is the third novella in The Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti series by Malka Older. This series is such a great science fiction story taking place on Jupiter after with queer characters that you root for. The science aspect of this space adventure is not always explained, but the focus is definitely on the characters and the rich new society that Older has crafted for this world. I like that even if you don't speak the many languages the characters casually dish out (like international slang) you definitely know what they mean from the dialogue and scene context. The investigative duo, Mossa and Pleiti, are engaging and their point of views make them feel like distinctly different and real people. I love their interactions and the way the duo problem solves together as they embark on this book's mystery.

There are clues scattered throughout the book leading up to the reveal at the end. Depression is a huge aspect of this book, but make no mistake the romantic relationship between Mossa and Pleiti strengthens. Although there is danger this could still be considered a cozy mystery with how much we spend within the book focused on just the characters. I highly recommend this book and the entire series for character-focused readers.

Thank you to Tor Books and NetGalley for the copy of this book to review.

This was a fantastic continuation in the series. I enjoyed the change up of the book being from Pleiti's perspective instead of Mossa's. I think it made it fresh and seeing another University/platform in the world make me more excited for any potential future books in the series, as the world continues to expand, but also doesn't lose track of the plot lines from previous books.

While I love the world building in this series, this installment did not grab me. The fact that Mossa didn't show up until halfway through the story, and that the drama of their relationship played such a large part did not make it as gripping a read for me. Also, the mixing of languages and use of unfamiliar (made up?) words was a stumbling block for me. I was way too aware of that and it messed with the flow of the novel for me.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC!

This is the third installment in her Mossa and Pleiti mystery series (the others are The Mimicking of Known Successes and The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles), and I was so glad to find out that a fourth and fifth are planned. I prefer to describe these books as comforting, as the author does, rather than c_zy, that annoying term that has become such a marketing favorite recently. But that’s not why I read them. Each one is a well-crafted mystery set against an amazing background of human settlement of Jupiter and perfectly entwined with a complicated relationship of the two major characters.

Each novel reveals a bit more of the strange life of humans dwelling in cities built on platforms atop geosynchronous rings around a gas giant. However improbable it seems, people have adapted well after a couple of centuries to living under atmoshields that provide basically breathable air, though everyone needs a further dose of oxygen through their personal atmoscarves. Pleiti is a professor of Classical studies (the effort to rediscover details of life on a scorched Earth in hopes of one day resettling that planet) while Mossa is an Investigator who looks into cases of missing people and criminal activity. Pleiti lives in her comfortable suite of rooms at the Valdegeld university where she sometimes has to deal with peers in the Modern faculty (devoted to studying conditions on Giant, the name Older has given to Jupiter, and its moons). Mossa and Pleiti were lovers in college, later grew apart, but gradually came back together in the context of Mossa’s investigations in the first two books of the series.

So it is a shock to find Mossa in the Prologue to The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses lurking outside Pleiti’s rooms but unable to bring herself to knock on the door. That scene is followed in Chapter One by Pleiti wondering if Mossa’s declining all her invitations was beginning to add up to a problem. When she hears a knock on the door she opens, expecting Mossa, only to find someone she cannot quite place – Petanj, an old school mate who wants Pleiti to come to a distant university where her cousin, Villette, is up for a donship but has been getting serious threats. When Pleiti goes to Mossa’s apartment to seek her help, she is stunned by her lover’s refusal to even hear about the case or to have anything to do with her. So it is up to Pleiti to take on the role of investigator, though she feels not at all up to the job. She joins Petanj on a days’ long train ride to Stortellen and its university where Villette has been doing her research on the artificial atmosphere. During that journey, she realizes that Mossa must be suffering a severe bout of depression and berates herself for not trying harder to help her friend. For much of her trip and investigation, Pleiti will beat up on herself and have to fight off the yearning to return to Mossa’s side.

But Pleiti continues and is thrust immediately on arriving in Stortellen into a dinner party with a large group of Villette’s friends. Here we meet many of the possible suspects, each a well drawn character. Villette herself is a completely likable person so completely immersed in her research and optimistic about the world that she cannot imagine why anyone she knows would harbor deep animosity. Her research on atmospherics has led to her invention of a nose filter that makes atmoscarves unnecessary, and she wants to give away this new technology for the public good. Naively, she cannot imagine why anyone would object, yet there are many possibilities. The University could lose by not being able to profit from the license, the firms that sell atmoscarves could go out of business, and several colleagues could easily envy her expected early promotion to a donship. To Villette’s consternation, the threats keep coming and escalate from written forms to physical attacks.

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The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses, and the series as a whole, has just about everything I look for in a novel. The writing pulls me in as it weaves together a good mystery, interesting scifi elements about life around a gas giant, good characters and the ongoing complications of the relationship between Mossa and Pleiti. It’s a wonderful diversion from the true doomscrolling of the day’s latest intolerable news but one that keeps you in touch with the realities of human emotion.

As ever, Older delivers a modern take on a Holmesian mystery, updated with all the sci fi trappings we've come to love and the academia politics we can't resist. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance copy.

Unfortunately, I just could not get into this book. The setting and the lingo were just not it for me. I tried really hard to get into it and to care but I just couldn’t. I don’t care about the characters at all nor the storyline to be completely honest.

The third of Malka Older's mysteries on the platforms that surround the gas giant Jupiter is a delightful mix of Victorian mystery, with Holmes and Watson vibes, post-apocalyptic science fiction and sapphic romance. Pleti and Mossa make a terrific team in love and life, with believable feelings and just unbelievable enough events. This story also delves into the emotional cost of trolls and stalkers, microagressions and the classist and ableist underpinnings of academic research.

A fantastic read, a great mystery and a unique love story.

This was my favorite of the series, I think! I enjoyed the plot, but more than that, I felt like the characters were absolutely my favorite! I feel like we really got to know Pleiti so much in this story, and even Mossa (or at least, some of her struggles). That, and the side characters were the most enjoyable in this installment as well, and I do hope we continue to see some of them going forward in the series. I will say, I am so glad I read this on my Kindle! I have a pretty extensive vocabulary, but between Pleiti's next-level vocabulary, and the fact that many of the words in this world are from a variety of languages, it was so much easier to look up on my Kindle (yay technology), so I would think this would be a little more frustrating in a physical or audiobook. Overall, I highly recommend this series, especially this installment, and cannot wait for whatever comes next for Pleiti and Mossa!

Sometimes you just have to give into the fact that a particular book, series, or author just isn’t for you. Sadly, I think I’ve reached that point after reading The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses, the third book in Malka Older’s THE INVESTIGATIONS OF MOSSA AND PLEITI.

Though I’ve never really fallen hard for any of the first three works, I say “sadly” because I love the premise behind them. Or I should say, several of the premises. The first is the setting, a future where humanity was forced to abandon Earth thanks to our own deprivations and now, in greatly depleted numbers, lives on orbital platforms around Jupiter. Another is how the stories are a clear homage to and play with the Sherlock Holmes stories, with characters to stand in for each (Mossa as Holmes and Pleiti as Watson), clever allusions, and a usage of the source material that goes beyond plug and play. And finally, I enjoy (well, mostly, but more on that later) how Pleiti is a university scholar and how academia plays a major role in the stories.

But while I love the premises, I’ve been less enamored of the execution for various reasons, such as the mystery elements being generally weak or the characters occasional grating. In my review of book two, I noted my issues but said I’d still pick up book three in hopes of some improvement in the areas I had problems with. Unfortunately, the third book was my least favorite, and I considered giving up on it multiple times. Honestly, were it not a novella and a review book, I would have.

My major issues were the same as with the prior books, but to a greater degree. The mystery here just was not particularly engaging. The stakes were not that high, the villain’s acts felt repetitive and often implausible, the investigation was desultory and sporadic, the villain melodramatic, and the solving of the whodunnit left no room for the reader and felt anticlimactic. The secondary characters were flat and mostly indistinguishable, sometimes implausible, and for all their alleged intelligence many of them felt more like 13-year-olds. And while I know part of this is an intended critique of academics and academic institutions (from an academic), it felt over the top (and I say that as one who has seen the uglier sides of academia). As for the main characters, I confess that I grew extremely weary of Plieti’s first-person voice obsessing over Mossa very early And Mossa— by absence, personality, and context (a bout of depression) — was a non-entity. I know I was supposed to care about their relationship and about Mossa’s mental health, but didn’t.

The world remains interesting, but there was too little of it here to make up for the above. And I like how Older throws in a slew of unfamiliar words from different language groups and an evolved language. There seems a lot more of that here if I recall correctly, and sometimes I wondered if there was too much of that (both due to the interruptive factor and because it sometimes felt awkward or forced), and I think this will probably evoke a highly polarized reader response.

Obviously, my personal response was overall negative, enough that I’ll be stopping the series here. That said, these books have garnered a number of awards, they are clearly highly popular. Given their brevity, I’d still recommend giving the first one a shot given that I seem to be the outlier here. If you don’t like the book, I’d suggest not continuing in hopes that will change. And if you do like it, then keep going and enjoy!

Thank you to NetGalley and Tor Books for letting me read an e-ARC of The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka Older! I’ve rated this book 3.5 out of 5 stars, but have rounded it up to 4 out of 5 stars for this review.

Let me start by saying that I love this cozy, sci-fic, mystery novella series. Our two main characters, Pleiti and Mossa, reek of queer Watson and Sherlock inspiration and I am SO here for it. That being said, this particular installment fell a little short for me. I know the stories operate from Pleiti’s POV, but I always look forward to watching Mossa work and operate from Pleiti’s perspective. It’s no spoiler to mention that Mossa is not present for over half of this story and that, for me, really made the story drag. I didn’t love constantly listening to Pleiti pout over Mossa’s absence during an active investigation. Each scene, though masterfully strung together, seemed to take eons even though they were extremely short chapters in a 250 page novella. I wasn’t particularly taken by the new characters introduced, Petanj and Villette, so they didn’t help pique my interest in unfolding the mystery of this story. I found myself more interested in the technologies in development at Stortellen by Villette than the actual characters themselves. When Mossa does finally make her appearance and helps Pleiti unravel the mystery at hand, things really picked up pace for me. It was a satisfying, though slightly nail-biting, ending as this series has accomplished every book thus far.

The aforementioned complaints aside, this is still a fantastic read! I think the mystery was well-crafted and the characterization choices make sense given the previous two books’ plots. As always, Older is a wonderful writer who uses absolutely gorgeous language (and who challenged my knowledge of the English language; I had sought out a dictionary more than once) and has managed to combine multiple languages to invent or repurpose slang throughout this series.

Despite this not being my favorite installment, I will continue to read this series and I look forward to the next book whenever that comes out!

The first Mossa and Pleiti book was a murder mystery, the second a missing person case, and this one now a threat of violence and academic sabotage. This one had a bit of a different vibe from the first two books, as Mossa is absent for a good portion of the book, and Pleiti is taking the lead on the investigation on her own. We still get all the comfort of the first two books, with the warmth and coziness of the food and living spaces being a focus. The Holmes and Watson vibe came through really strongly in this book, more strongly than in the last two in my opinion.

The mystery came together pretty well, but I did find that there were maybe too many new characters introduced and I had a tough time keeping track of them. I did like the evolution of Mossa and Pleiti's relationship and how they both showed character growth against the background of the main plot.

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**TL;DR**: Maybe the strongest in this series so far!
**Source**: NetGalley , Thank you so much to the publisher!

**Plot**: Pleiti heads out on job on her own, and we see a fantastic challenge to an old Sherlockian trope.
**Characters**: I loved the cast on this one, there was a great cast here and we see a lot of development with our primary characters
**Setting:** As always I love this Jupiter settlement the ladies live on and in this one we see a different college and town!
**Mystery:** I solved this one but I didn’t expect it to go quite as hard as it did.

**Thoughts:**

This series just works for me, but I know it’s not going to work for everyone. It’s a bit dense, it’s a reworking of Sherlock Holmes story types and tropes, and it’s somewhat dark in places. But for me it’s on point. This third volume might be my favorite in the series so far. It’s the biggest volume and after the second one it’s the most interesting.

Mossa ends up taking a case on her own due to Pleiti’s fit of depression and apathy (something classic to Holmes). This makes for a fascinating discussion later on the series as the two are in a romantic relationship as much as a platonic relationship. Watching Mossa work on her own was very interesting as she has been learning the skills of investigating from Pleiti. Now, I’m not saying Pleiti is a bit of a damp napkin but this solitary investigation really suited Mossa here. We saw a lot more of the culture and language of the world, a new college environment and some very great growth in her character.

Pleiti does show up, and as I noted a good conversation is had about her apathy and depressive fit. I appreciated this a lot. As a trop we often see it repeated in Holmesian inspired work but rarely do we see it challenged or addressed. Additionally the mystery itself was darker and even with Pleiti there, had quite a bit of tension and suspense to it.

Overall a fantastic new entry in this series and one I really recommend continuing on to.