Station Eternity

The Midsolar Murders, Book 1

By: Mur Lafferty

Narrated by: Sarah Mollo-Christensen

Length: 15 hrs and 32 mins

Publisher's summary

Amateur detective Mallory Viridian’s talent for solving murders ruined her life on Earth and drove her to live on an alien space station, but her problems still follow her in this witty, self-aware novel that puts a speculative spin on murder mysteries, from the Hugo-nominated author of Six Wakes.

From idyllic small towns to claustrophobic urban landscapes, Mallory Viridian is constantly embroiled in murder cases that only she has the insight to solve. But outside of a classic mystery novel, being surrounded by death doesn’t make you a charming amateur detective, it makes you a suspect and a social pariah. So when Mallory gets the opportunity to take refuge on a sentient space station, she thinks she has the solution. Surely the murders will stop if her only company is alien beings. At first her new existence is peacefully quiet…and markedly devoid of homicide.

But when the station agrees to allow additional human guests, Mallory knows the break from her peculiar reality is over. After the first Earth shuttle arrives, and aliens and humans alike begin to die, the station is thrown into peril. Stuck smack-dab in the middle of an extraterrestrial whodunit, and wondering how in the world this keeps happening to her anyway, Mallory has to solve the crime—and fast—or the list of victims could grow to include everyone on board….

©2022 Mur Lafferty (P)2022 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“What a glorious romp. Murder, sentient space stations, and banter. It had everything I wanted.” (Mary Robinette Kowal, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of The Calculating Stars)

“A science fiction mystery has to nail both the science fiction and the mystery, and this book passes both tests with flying colors. As bingeable and satisfying as your favorite murder show. I couldn't put it down.” (Sarah Pinsker, Nebula Award-winning author of A Song For A New Day and We Are Satellites)

“Lafferty's characters stomp off the page, kicking ass and taking names as they do. If Jessica Fletcher ended up on Babylon Five, you still wouldn't get anywhere close to this deft, complicated, fast-moving book. Station Eternity kept me up way too late turning pages.” (T. Kingfisher, Hugo and Nebula Award-Winning author of Paladin's Grace and Nettle & Bone)

Don't regret listening to it, should have read it.

The story is interesting, I enjoyed the many different points of view and flashbacks which gave the book a lot of textures and plot points all running to the finish line together. I wish there was a little more in way of the mystery trope but I didn't see the ending coming which is fun for me since I read a lot and tend to guess (often not correctly) the ending in a book. I think there's a lot for the series to grow into. Unfortunately the narration for this main character was distracting and breathy. I don't think I could be friends with the main character if she indeed sounded like that all the time, a bit too damsel in distress for me. Fun and worth listening to if you are busy doing chores or walking dogs though!

Wonderful Sci-fi Murder Mystery

Take Murder, She Wrote and Babylon 5 and slam them together and you end up with this gem. Great beginning to a new series that is genre-defying in a good way. Try it, Mur Lafferty doesn't disappoint!

Annoying intonation

I like the story but have stopped listening because the narration is not my cup of tea. The narrator’s voice is whiny and their intonation of at least half of the sentences is identical, which makes it sound robotic. I couldn’t focus on the plot because the voice was too distracting.

So Good!

This was my first time reading Mur Lafferty and I'm now a big fan. Interesting and complex characters, nice pace, sweet plot revelations, and my favorite theme - interspeceies relations! Also love that while love was a theme, it was not a "love story".

Murder in space among aliens

Mur Lafferty's Station Eternity is a murder mystery set mainly on an alien space station. The main character, Mallory has a skill for solving murders which is convenient because they seem to always occur around her. She has managed to wrangle her way onto an alien space station to get away from Earth. There are only two other humans on the station, an Earth ambassador and another human receiving sanctuary. The whole background is related through a series of disjointed flashbacks that change the interpretation of subsequent actions. Humans seems unique among intelligent life as the only species without an accompanying symbiont. All hell breaks loose when a shuttle from Earth with many humans suffers an attack at the same time the station's AI symbiont is murdered.

While the premise is interesting, the frequent flashbacks hop around extensively with each vignette twisting the interpretation of previous flashbacks. There's some worn out cliches with the US military developing a weapon against all aliens. At the same time, the aliens are just bizarre with familial issues like any dysfunctional Earth family. The long setup to arrange the passenger manifest on the shuttle has the feel of a Hollywood murder mystery where the station is like a castle on a dark and stormy night.

The narration is well done, although the aliens don't seem alien relative to the humans. Pacing is uneven due to the frequent and sudden flashbacks.

Awesome concept, shaky execution

I absolutely love the idea behind this! And the world the author has built is fascinating—very cool to see the different species and the take on how it would be to be a human where nothing, from the food to the chairs to the toilets, is built with your species in mind. The author gave each character a backstory and personality, including several aliens. In several cases those characters were a bit caricatured or cliched, but I think that’s an inherent feature of the concept—if someone is somehow constantly finding themselves at the center of a classic murder mystery, then presumably they are also often surrounded by cliched characters.

That said, the lengthy flashbacks to the backstories were not very interesting, and they didn’t really affect the plot enough to be worth it. In fact, the protagonists didn’t really accomplish much either—this was much more a story of events witnessed and (for some) survived than a mystery or thriller where personal agency affected the outcome.

The writing was good throughout but the plot dragged and meandered quite a bit. As did the characters! There are long periods of running around urgently from point a to point b and back to point a, but not in a way that achieves much.

If you are looking for a nice exploration of human-alien and alien-alien relations, this is a great read! But if you are looking for a mystery novel in space (this may be my bad for misunderstanding the summary), this isn’t one really. The character with Jessica Fletcheritis doesn’t really follow through on the promise of that, and solving the mystery is not really central to events or the result of any effort or cleverness.

Good story and already ordered the next.

I really like the voice work of the performer and the story had some nice twists and turns.

Very Enjoyable

Nice world building, believable characters, coherent story line - well done all the way around.

Great mystery!

I loved the complexity of this book! The beginning was a bit slow but I am so glad that I waited for the action!! This was a different way of looking at a mystery and I was hooked! I am definitely reading the next book in this series! Excellent writing!! I highly recommend!

An interesting take on the entire genre

Have you ever wondered, when reading a typical "cozy mystery" series (or watching "Murder, She Wrote") - how many murders is this person going to be in the middle of, or encounter, before people just start staying away from them completely? When it seems that every few months someone around you is getting killed, or you're discovering a body, I would think that people would stop hanging around you - and imagine the toll on your own mental health.

THAT is essentially the premise for Mur Lafferty's Station Eternity series. Mallory Viridian is a woman who solves murders - and is always around them, connected with them somehow. Unlike the rest of the genre, where nobody seems to think anything is odd about this at all, people start to wonder about Mallory - and start to stay away from her. Mallory wonders about herself as well, and eventually manages to head off into space - where there are no people (no humans, anyway) to get killed around her. Until there are ....

If you are a fan of Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently series, you'll enjoy this book and it's rather trippy take on murder mystery tropes. And as in a good Dirk Gently book, you will have to pay REALLY close attention if you want to solve the mystery before Mallory does. That said, this isn't a cozy mystery read - it took me a while, and I put it down several times and read something else to take a break. But Station Eternity pulls you back in every time, and it is worth the effort to really read it and enjoy it.