Station Eternity (The Midsolar Murders #1), by Mur Lafferty

  You know when you are trying to finish a book and you don't really enjoy it, but you feel you own it to the author to at least finish it before you review it? That's what Station Eternity was to me. And because of that feeling, I stopped reading anything for a few months. Which is a lot. Finally, I've decided it wasn't worth it and DNFed it.

  The premise is intriguing: a human apparently cursed to cause murders to happen around her and then be the one to solve the murder. Like an involuntary Jane Marple. So she just has to get away from people on an alien space station, home to all kinds of weird and interesting species. So what happens when a shuttle full of humans is approaching the station?

  The execution was terrible, for me at least. It's not that Mur Lafferty's style is bad, it's just that she focuses on ideas and details that I find absolutely uninteresting. There are some other books that gave me a similar vibe, where things happen in space during some major crisis, but the focus is not on the science or the conflict, but on the romantic interests and random feelings of the characters. This is not quite like as bad, but it's close.

  Bottom line:  I couldn't hate the book, but I couldn't like it either, so I just decided to read other stuff.

  P.S. I am a fan (although not a frequent consumer) of Escape Pod, Pseudopod and PodCastle, with which the author is/was affiliated. If that connection would have been relevant, I would have praised the book more, but obviously, that's not the case. Those podcasts are cool, though, and completely free!