Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty. I was drawn to this book by its core premise: if you really had life of Jessica Fletcher or Miss Marple - i.e., if murders happened around you all the time, everywhere you went - you would probably be a psychological wreck, suspected by the police, and feared/loathed by others. There's already so much to work with there, but Lafferty takes this character and drops them in a post-first-contact world with a plot that includes a shadowy government agency, a deranged sentient space station, eight or ten symbiotic alien races, a serial killer, sabotage, and a battle between a spaceship and mecha, and creates supporting characters that include an incompetent ambassador, a fugitive military mortuary specialist, a concert violinist with commando-level combat skills, a rap star, and a psychotic black ops contractor. Whew! That's a lot!
However, Lafferty takes all this and spins a ripping yarn across 452 pages and somehow manages to keep all (or most, anyway) of the plates spinning. I kept on reading, which these days says a lot in itself. Worth the time, if you have the stamina.
And it looks like this is just the first in a series. Buckle up!
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