NOBODY'S BABY

A detective aboard an interstellar ship where all childbearing is on indefinite hold gets drawn into a case involving an infant mysteriously left at her nephew’s door.

The last thing Dorothy Gentleman expected is involvement in a child abandonment case. Before departing Earth, all 10,000 passengers aboard the spaceship Fairweather underwent a procedure to pause their reproductive abilities. Now, centuries later, Dorothy’s gay nephew, Ruthie, and his husband, John, inexplicably find a baby outside their cabin. They all want answers, but Dorothy in particular wants to protect the child from her starchy rules-and-regulations colleague, Leloup, who sees the infant as “a disaster for civil disorder and general calm.” If Leloup has his way, the baby will be unable to download memories into a memory-book before death and then upload them into a new body. This second installment of Waite’s Dorothy Gentleman cozy mystery-in-space series will delight readers with quirky characters, wry dialogue, and a puzzle-like plot reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple books. Dorothy eventually locates the mother, who’s been newly incarnated and who, oddly enough, has no memory of giving birth. It quickly becomes clear that the child’s right to preserve his memories for future incarnations isn’t the only issue at stake. Someone with motives Dorothy is determined to discover wanted the old incarnation of the baby’s mother dead. Waite’s imaginative merging of futuristic settings and technologies with elements of the classic whodunit is only part of what makes this novel so successful. Her handling of themes like memory, love, and the bonds that create a family add a level of quiet poignancy that makes Waite’s book both entertaining and meaningful.

A gentle charmer of an SF mystery that surprises as it satisfies.