The Spare Man

by Mary Robinette Kowal

Genres: Crime, Mystery, Science Fiction
Pages: 357
Rating:

Synopsis:

Tesla Crane, one of the richest women in the world, is on her honeymoon on an interplanetary space liner, cruising between Earth and Mars. She’s traveling incognito and is reveling in her anonymity. Then someone is murdered and her husband is named as the prime suspect. To save him from the frame-up, Tesla will risk exposure and face demons from her past.
Even though doing so might make her the next victim.

Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Spare Man is a fun mystery set in space, on a cruise liner to Mars, which uses the setting well to help shape the mystery: differences in gravity, technology, the delay in communicating with an earth-based lawyer, Tesla Crane’s status as a celebrity (and ways of handling that via technological and less technological methods of disguise).

I enjoyed the characters and their bond (even if it sometimes felt like they should maybe focus and not canoodle), and the portrayal of Tesla’s disabilities and how they affect her investigation — and of course, gotta love her support dog, Gimlet. All of those trappings help it feel less like just a Golden Age mystery in space, and also an attempt to talk about and show us specific characters and how they cope with a mystery. The fact that Tesla could dial her pain up and down was convenient, the idea of the technology does make sense (we have things that might be the beginnings of that already, after all), so I think it was a mostly-reasonable effort at having Tesla take part in some of the action without writing out her disabilities altogether, especially as she later faces consequences in terms of more pain.

I’d probably have liked to see her use her technological skills a bit more; there are reasons she doesn’t (related to her trauma), but… still. It was a way for her to contribute to solving the mystery a bit more actively, since mostly she didn’t fully see what Shal was working out. Instead, her money/status was often the key, which kinda felt like certain rich tech bros taking credit for being smart when they’ve actually just got practically infinite resources. Not my favourite aspect.

I diiiid find that at certain points the mystery seemed obvious to me, and was thus unnecessarily drawn out, but I still mostly enjoyed how the pieces came together. I did have a portion of it at least figured out before the reveal, though that was partly guesswork rather than fair play, I think.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)