I read this book because it was on a list of genre-defying sf books that looked interesting[*] and also because I had enjoyed the Rosewater books by Tade Thompson as well.

That list billed this book as a "locked starship murder mystery", and having that expectation disappointed me a little. This is no The Spare Man or Six Wakes where the plot involves chasing clues about the killer and the climax is the reveal of what's been going on. There is definitely a detective and a starship captain and a mystery, but the pacing of when the reveal happens makes this book feel much more like thriller/action/horror than an out and out mystery book. This is mostly my own expectations ruining things, but that structure removed a lot of the tension for me.

I enjoyed the aliens in this book (as expected from Tade Thompson). I won't talk details to avoid being too spoilery but I appreciated the afterword, where Thompson says "I try to lean away from aliens being Other because that’s tied up with colonialist thinking" and I think that's successfully done here.

Overall, I wanted to like this more than I did and wasn't particularly grabbed by any of the characters or the world. If you wanted a Tade Thompson recommendation, I'd still read Rosewater first. If you wanted a space murder mystery, read anything I've mentioned above or Fugitive Telemetry or The Tea Master and the Detective or or or

[*] bookriot.com/genre-defying-sci-fi-books/