Saturday, July 24, 2021

Five captivating SFF mystery novels

At Tor.com James Davis Nicoll tagged five favorite recent sci-fi & fantasy novels, including:
Seven of Infinities by Aliette de Bodard (2020)

Scholar Vân struggles to make a meagre living as a tutor despite the challenges she faces as a product of the lower classes. The well-to-do often will not value instruction if it is delivered by someone from the lower orders. As if class were somehow contagious.

She is now faced with an even greater problem: an unexplained corpse found in quarters belonging to Vân’s student Uyên.

The Militia demands that all such deaths have satisfactory explanations, whether true or not. Vân’s personal history, if viewed in an unfavourable light, might make her an acceptable scapegoat. Thus, a reason for Vân and her criminally-inclined shipmind ally The Wild Orchid in Sunless Woods to figure out who the dead woman was, what killed her, and what brought her to Uyên’s quarters.

Detection leads them in an unexpected direction. What begins as a possible murder mystery transforms into a treasure hunt…albeit one that has already left a trail of bodies in its wake.
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue