I try not to pigeonhole myself too much as a reader. While cosy as a descriptor in general tends to make me feral with irritation, there are exceptions and this book is definitely an exception. I was delighted when my library hold for this book arrived, even though I couldn’t remember what led me to place that hold. Perhaps it’s the combination of sci fi, mystery, and cosy that made me curious.

Dorothy Gentleman is a detective onboard the Fairweather – a massive space ship travelling for a 1000 years to a new planet from Old Earth, with 10 000 people on board. They have a nifty system of storing a back up of your mind in the Library and so when your body dies, you can upload your mind to a new body. This system has worked for 300 years at least so far.

The Library is sacrosanct and it’s supposed to be impossible to erase someone’s mind-book. Only Dorothy wakes up in someone else’s body only two years after she retired because someone destroyed her book in the library and her back up was sent to a body immediately. You’re not supposed to wake up in the wrong body so something has gone wrong. It all happened during a magnetic storm which has been known to impact the ship’s system (nicknamed Ferry). So Dorothy has a mystery to solve. There is another death to solve, too. Is it related? How? Dorothy intends to find out.

There is some whimsy in the story but it’s never cloying or overly sweet. For example, Ferry can appear drunk during magnetic storms, which complicates the investigation while also being funny. In contrast to drunk Ferry, Dorothy is pretty matter of fact and the contrast was charming.

The mystery element is very cleverly constructed and required a bit of concentration on my part to make sure I kept the story straight in my head. This might be because what feels like a full-size mystery plays out in a novella. So every word counts. It might also be because I read this book on a day when I’d been distracted by some very bad news, so I wasn’t at my mental peak.

All the characters who you meet in a meaningful sense are gay. Dorothy is a lesbian who not so recently lost her partner and is coming to terms with that. Dorothy’s nephew lives with a man. The prime suspects in the case are lesbians too. It was a delight!

There is also something exciting about the ending:

On top of all of this, I really enjoyed the writing style. There is an economical use of words that still plumb the depths of human emotion, and human experience.

Here is an excerpt from when Dorothy first wakes up in a stranger’s body:

My skin – someone’s skin – broke out in gooseflesh. Of course every human body was a horrifying collection of juices and tissues, acids and effluvia poured into a bag with a bunch of long rocks, a shambling accident of biology that made its own mysterious and often frustrating decisions without reference to the mind. They were disgusting miracles, every one. It was always a bit unsettling to wake up in a fresh form, until habit made a home of it.

But someone else’s home, and my self inside it! A nightmare.

The second book in this series is out now and I shall definitely be reading it. I’m so happy to have found another sleuth with granny vibes and a hard eye for the truth.