THE STARLINER MURDERS

A reluctant celebrity police detective in the alien-filled galaxy of the far future is drawn into an investigation of deaths aboard a luxury tourist starship in Charsper’s SF novel.

In a 30th-century space-operatic future of variegated aliens (and frequent human-alien intermarriage), Avei Themis is the daughter of a pair of “Arachnologist” scientists, a pan-species couple with an entire institute devoted to studying the galaxy’s rarest spiders for potential wonder-drug cures. Following the murder of her sister by a sadistic serial killer a decade earlier, Avei pursued a career in law enforcement with the Mernin Security Forces, specializing in hunting the worst multiple murderers across all the known worlds. As a result, Avei has become (quite against her wishes) a celebrity sleuth, the subject of a series of unauthorized books and movies (“The vast majority of the content they published was false”). Having lost two of her best friends while trailing a fire-worshipping religious fanatic in a previous adventure, Avei now considers herself a failure and wants to leave the field to go back to work in spider science instead. But it so happens there is another infamous serial slayer, nicknamed Zarul, now at large—and Zarul’s MO is to terrorize and kill using a variety of the deadliest spiders. A victim of arachnid poisoning turns up on the luxury star-liner Delphi, which is operated (not entirely well) by the powerful and possibly compromised Breckin family. Avei (accompanied by her shape-shifting holographic AI partner Sezin) is tasked to investigate. The ship carries a number of shady potential suspects, including the violent wastrel heir to the Breckin business empire, a cash-poor aspiring actress/runaway cult member, and a debt-ridden writer who has built her career on exploiting a thinly disguised Avei in print with a series of potboilers. Even a space mafia syndicate may lurk in the shadows. The Delphimakes an unexpected jump into wormhole-travel space before Avei can disembark and make good on her promise to quit the force, trapping the ensemble on board for 12 hours with at least one sinister slayer amid the cast.

Underneath the rococo menagerie of alien races bearing manifold shapes and scales and numbers of arms, the narrative is a fairly classic whodunit, perhaps with a smaller suspect pool than one might expect under the cosmos-spanning circumstances. The solution to the enigma isn’t exactly a head-spinner, but it satisfies and makes sense on its own broad terms. While the far-out milieu and space-opera trimmings carry baggage that might tilt the novel toward SF camp, the author refrains from pitching the material at a lightweight ray-gun level or going overboard into hardboiled noir cliches. Yes, down these mean spaceways a gal must go, but the story is given a human (well, mostly human) face. Avei carries her own deep scars, psychological and physical, from her life and career choices; there is a hint of romance on the event-horizon, and death-by-spider is not pretty (even though the heroine defines herself as a lover of animals, including the nasty eight-legged creatures). If the Kirk-Spock era starship USSEnterprise had a few spinner-racks of pulp paperbacks in the lounge for recreational crew consumption, this material would fit right in.

A shamus in space vs. a serial killer wielding alien spiders—not as silly as it sounds.