OFFICIAL AUTHOR BIO: Nebula and Hugo Award-winning author, Mary Robinette Kowal is a novelist and professional puppeteer. In 2008 she won the Astounding Award for Best New Writer and her debut novel Shades of Milk and Honey (Tor 2010) was nominated for the 2010 Nebula Award for Best Novel. In 2019, the first book in the Lady Astronaut series The Calculating Stars (Tor 2018), won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards, becoming one of only eighteen novels to do so. Her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, and several Year’s Best anthologies, as well as in her collection Scenting the Dark and Other Stories from Subterranean Press. Her short story collection Word Puppets was published in 2015, and includes both of her Hugo Award-winning stories in addition to fifteen others, running the full range of speculative fiction. In 2016, her World War I fantasy novel Ghost Talkers was published by Tor books, followed in 2018 by her alternate history Lady Astronaut series.

From 2019-2021, Kowal was the President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

In 2011, after several appearances as a guest star on the podcast Writing Excuses, Kowal became a permanent member of the cast. In 2013, the seventh season of the podcast won the Hugo Award for Best Related Work. Her involvement in the podcast also contributed to the creation of the Shadows Beneath anthology, in which Kowal and her three co-hosts contributed short stories alongside materials charting the unique creative process of each author.

FORMAT/INFO: The Spare Man was published by Tor Books on October 11th, 2022. It is 368 pages split over 38 chapters. It is told in third person from Tesla's point of view. It is available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook formats. 

 

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: All Tesla Crane wanted was a quiet honeymoon vacation with her husband. Famed for her vast fortune, her advances in robotics, and a destructive lab accident that damaged her spine, Tesla came on this space cruise to Mars with the hopes of hiding under a false identity and enjoying a pleasant, uneventful voyage. But shortly into the trip, a murder is committed on the ship and Tesla’s husband is arrested as the lead suspect. With ship security convinced the matter is an open and closed case, it’s up to Tesla to prove her husband’s innocence and find the real killer.

The Spare Man is a perfectly serviceable murder mystery in space. Its best feature is lead character Tesla Crane, a determined woman who refuses to be told “No” under any circumstances. While that characteristic drives her to find the real killer on her own, it also, to her detriment, causes her to ignore warning signs from her body, which suffered severe damage years ago in an accident and is held together with metal rods and a neural bot that can suppress pain responses. Tesla has a habit of turning up the pain dampening past the safeties in order to be more effective, which is never framed as a good thing, but also is never really given severe consequences. Regardless, Tesla is a disabled heroine who has learned to navigate the world (mostly) within her new limits, and frequently has to deal with PTSD flashbacks from the accident itself.

The plot itself is fine and will be recognizable to fans of The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett (as well as the classic movie adaptation), though with the focus on the female half of the crime-solving duo rather than the husband. There’s plenty of red herrings that will keep you guessing about the identity of the murderer, and plenty of suspects with their own hidden motivations.

My biggest complaint about the story is the incompetency of the lead security officer on the ship. Now I know in murder mystery fiction this is often a feature, not a bug of the story, a reason why the protagonist has to investigate things for themselves. But besides blindly ignoring evidence, the lead security officer was a sexist scumbag, in stark contrast to the rest of this near future society, which is queernormative and includes pronoun exchanges in all introductions. I know that there will always be awful people and that this security guard probably exists to highlight how society has evolved, but juxtaposed with the other people on the ship, he was just gratingly anachronistic. Your mileage may vary on whether or not this character bothers you – I always have a hard time with incompetent people.

CONCLUSION: The Spare Man falls into that difficult-to-review middling category of book. For a person in the mood for a murder mystery with a fun twist, this will be just the ticket. The advanced technology the characters use to communicate and investigate add a new flavor to the story. I did enjoy the comedic layer of Tesla attempting to have conversations with her lawyer on Earth, as the distance of the ship from the planet caused delayed responses, with answers to questions coming well after they were originally asked. Tesla’s struggle with her physical and post-traumatic disabilities do give her some depth (as well as an adorable service dog). But at the end of the day, this is a book that, while enjoyable, just isn’t memorable.