Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty – Review

Published: January 31, 2017

Publisher: Orbit Books

Series: Standalone

Genre: Science Fiction, Mystery

Pages: 364 (Paperback)

My Rating: 4.0/5.0

Synopsis:

A space adventure set on a lone ship where the clones of a murdered crew must find their murderer — before they kill again.

It was not common to awaken in a cloning vat streaked with drying blood.

At least, Maria Arena had never experienced it. She had no memory of how she died. That was also new; before, when she had awakened as a new clone, her first memory was of how she died.

Maria’s vat was in the front of six vats, each one holding the clone of a crew member of the starship Dormire, each clone waiting for its previous incarnation to die so it could awaken. And Maria wasn’t the only one to die recently… 

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This is unlike any murder mystery I have ever picked up before. I’ve read several set in space, so nothing new there, but the real kicker is that none of the characters can remember what happened. They’re clones who’ve woken without much of their memories – I’m talking years worth just gone. 

It’s bad enough that these clones awake with a tremendous amount of missing time (and no memory back ups) but the whole darn room they’re in is covered in blood and gore and they encounter their dead bodies – something serious went down on their ship. As the story moves along, we begin to learn more about these six strange people, who seem to have all been criminals prior to boarding the starship Dormire. They also are all connected to a particular wealthy woman back on Earth – whether they worked with her, tried to assassinate her, or she just decided to interfere in someone’s life. The characters form factions, turning suspicions against one another, even as they must work together to fix critical aspects of the ship to survive. 

The slow unraveling of secrets makes for an engaging story and there were delightful surprises here and there. I listened to the audiobook, which was narrated by the author who did a pretty decent job. Some author-narrated books are just terrible, but this wasn’t bad (but not incredible either). It’s honestly been quite awhile since I read this, as I’ve been prioritizing reviews for new releases so I’m a little rusty on the finer details. I can say for certain I would definitely read another book by this author because it was pretty dang cool. And dark. But I liked it!