Book Review: The Spare Man - Mary Robinette Kowal

Ach. This is a hard one to give a lower review score to. I loved MRK's Lady Astronaut series - but this crime-thriller fell a little short of the mark for me.

Part of the problem with setting a whodunnit in the future is that you have to assume criminal detection technology gets better. That means an author has to find a way to nobble cameras with privacy force-fields and bypass biometric security. It becomes rather dissatisfying to have all the protections of modern society hand-waved away.

Similarly, I'm not entirely convinced the means, motive, and opportunity made much sense. Perhaps I shouldn't have kept pace with all the cocktail recipes in the book, but I'm still not sure who did it, or why.

The characters are charming - and each have an entertaining array of killer one-liners - but their actions get a little repetitive. Our protagonist is constantly turning down her pain receptors, yet never seems to suffer any meaningful consequences. Characters keep getting confined to quarters and then leaving. The lawyer character is fun, but all she does is repeatedly make grandiose threats with inventive swearing.

Previous books by the author have been heavy on the science and engineering - but here about the only concession is the increasing time-lag with communications to Earth, and a few nods to centripetal forces.

It hits all the tropes of the genre - double crossing, burly guards, gathering all the suspects in one room - but never quite seems to do anything special with the setting.