My Review: This follow-up to last year’s delightful Murder by Memory is, well, a bit more grounded than that series opener. That grounding being more than a bit ironic, as ship’s detective Dorothy Gentleman, along with the HMS Fairweather, the ship that she is one of the detectives both for and on, is three centuries out from Earth, headed for an unknown planet that still seems to be nowhere in sight.

My Review: Like all the best stories, Green City Wars starts with one hell of a “What if…” In fact it starts with two of them, one as likely - or not - as the other. On the one hand, there’s the idea that a post-climate apocalyptic Earth’s human population gets its act together BEFORE the planet becomes completely uninhabitable. That’s where the “green cities” part of the title comes in. Very much OTOH, what if Rocket Raccoon and his friends weren’t the product of an evil overlord’s experiment to create animal-based supersoldiers, but were instead the product of gene splicing megacorporations working on creating the perfect servitor class to maintain those new green cities while remaining nearly invisible, absolutely clean, carbon-neutral, totally eco-friendly AND both self-sustaining and self-replicating.

My Review: After five books, my feelings about Carl Butler have not changed a bit. I STILL want to buy the man a drink. The only thing that has changed is that now I’d try to include Mac in the drinking, in the hopes that one of them would spill something about their escapades. Just what gets put on the page is one hell of a story.

My Review: Some versions of the opening line for the blurb are way, way off. A Memory Called Empire meets Miss Marple is so far off as to be misleading. (The Becky Chambers version of the blurb is somewhat better.) I’m going to do my damndest to correct that misdirection as Murder By Memory is just a terrific cozy mystery that just so happens to be set on a spaceship.

My Review: Kellieth ReinAraneinth is caught between multiple rocks and abundant hard places, as when the story begins they can barely catch their breath. Literally. They may not be human but their breathing and sense of smell are both compromised by on-the-job chemical exposure resulting in a condition that may not quite BE chronic asthma, but is close enough as to make no difference.

My Review: This is a caper story. It says so right there on the label, doesn’t it? And it does not disappoint - even though this isn’t quite the caper that the reader thinks it will be. It’s not even the caper that the crew participating in it think it will be. Which, of course, is part of the caper itself, because they are the ones being conned and defrauded along with pretty much everyone else.

My Review: The first two Investigations of Mossa & Pleiti, The Mimicking of Known Successes and The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, both began with missing persons cases rather than the corpse that kicks off most mysteries. This third entry ALSO begins with a missing person, but not in the same way - at all. In the earlier books, the missing persons WERE the mystery, where this time the missing person is the person who usually investigates the mystery.

My Review: Lake Michigan is a freshwater lake. There are no bodies of saltwater closer than the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean, hundreds of miles away. Unless you’re counting the gigantic saltwater tank and the Shedd Aquarium, which Chicago Police Detective Ethan Krol is forced to think about in this puzzle of a case. The double homicide that he’s been called to utterly defies explanation.