Fans of locked room mysteries and boorish detectives will find much to love in Fugitive Telemetry, an outer space version of those classic tropes. This short novel is the sixth installment of Martha Wells’ Hugo-winning Murderbot Diaries, which follow the adventures of a cynically charming security cyborg who has hacked its way to something resembling free will and is now trying to solve the puzzle of a dead body on a space station where nobody can get in or out.
Like Arthur Conan Doyle’s famously misanthropic detective, Murderbot exhibits a Holmesian disdain for the fallibility and frailty of the human investigators with whom it’s forced to collaborate, as well as bafflement at their irrational customs. In the end, Fugitive Telemetry is as much about the price that unusual people (or bots) pay to live in a society as it is about cracking the case.
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