Justus's Reviews > Station Eternity

There are bad books. There are books that just aren't for me. But this is the biggest train wreck of a book in recent memory. By which I mean, it actually starts out really well with a lot of promise because turning into disaster.

Mallory constantly finds herself caught up in murder cases, just like other classic amateur detectives in Murder, She Wrote or Miss Marple. Except the author gives this a a darker twist: it would actually suck to know that every few months someone around you will get murdered! Your boyfriends would freak out and dump you. Your friends wouldn't want to be around you, in case they became your next case. Luckily (?) for Mallory, humans have recently made First Contact with aliens and she requests asylum on a nearby alien space station. Her reasoning is that if she's not around any other humans, then no one will get murdered.

Obviously this is stupid and makes no sense: why would her "ability" be limited to humans? Needless to say, a few months after living on the space station, somebody gets murdered....

This is 7th book I've read now from crimereads.com's end of year "best" lists. The experiment hasn't gone well: clearly I have very different tastes from the editors there and I think I need to cut this experiment short.

The first six chapters establish most of this and are entirely from Mallory's POV. Then the murder happens and the book goes off the rails. For the next half of the book we get introduced to a half dozen or so new characters who all get POV chapters and we are treated to their pointless backstories. Somehow most of them are connected to Mallory and/or her friend on the station, Xan. The actual murder gets dropped from the plot almost entirely. Indeed, it becomes secondary to everything else that happens for the rest of the book. The murder isn't even a mystery in any sense of the word since it is immediately obvious who did it. There aren't even any red herrings. Everyone thinks that guy did it.

Since the murder is open and shut, the book introduces a bunch of other plot lines to try to keep us interested. There's suddenly this whole thing involving the rock people aliens. And another one involving the wasp people aliens. And a few others.

It was honestly pretty confusing but also...boring? Like I care if Xan reconciles with his brother? Or if Stephanie transforms into a spaceship and gets off the station?

There's also just a bunch of laughable stuff. There's eventually an explanation given for why Mallory seems to always be around murders. And it is stupid. A shuttle, the first shuttle ever from Earth!, arrives. And on it are a half-dozen people who are connected to Mallory and/or Xan. There isn't even an attempt to explain this staggering coincidence except a few of them "won lottery tickets". One of them is even (view spoiler)[a convicted felon who is on parole and isn't allowed to travel and we're supposed to believe somehow nobody noticed that? These people would all be super famous and profiled! Xan's friend, who we are repeatedly told is a super-deadly expert of close combat in "strange situations", is somehow killed by a suburban housewife. Also, said housewife managed to murder someone on a space shuttle while surrounded by 20+ people and nobody noticed? (hide spoiler)]

By the end I wasn't hate reading exactly. That would imply this book was able to generate any emotion more powerful than vague annoyance in its readers. I was 50 pages from the end and considered stopping there, that's how lackluster it was.