2026 science fiction mystery novella. Dorothy Gentleman, ship's
detective aboard a starship on a thousand-year voyage, is confronted
with something that simply shouldn't be possible: a baby.
How did it get there (beyond the obvious, or indeed was it the
obvious)? What should be done about it? And what, if any, crime has
been committed?
Forensics of materials was something of a specialty of his. He'd
been a bricklayer once, before finding a body hidden in a wall and
asking the kind of questions that annoyed the kind of people who
left bodies in walls.
The first of these had a fair bit of world-building to do, and for my
taste sometimes leaned a bit too hard on its baroque technology as a
way to make a Golden Age detective story happen on an interstellar
ship. This one doesn't need to do as much of that, and is the better
for it, even if the plot ends up being rather simpler. There does
indeed end up being a murder to be solved, and I continue to enjoy the
way Waite points up how jealousy can continue even when money and
possessions are largely irrelevant; but also, the question of
whodunnit is almost secondary to the major consideration of what
happened and what is the right thing to do next.
I wondered if Flora knew how many broken hearts she was leaving in
her wake. I counted two so far, which wasn't so many, except that it
represented 100 percent of the people we'd talked to in Flora's
life.
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