Review: Six Wakes, by Mur Lafferty

Rating: ★★★★★

Genres: Science Fiction, Mystery

Goodreads / Amazon

I got the recommendation for this book from SFF Yeah! podcast and it sounded so, so good I couldn’t help getting it almost immediately.

The crew of a ship wakes up with no memory of the last 25 years. They are all clones, woken up all at the same time to a gruesome scene: all their previous clones drenched in blood, floating around the spaceship. They were all murdered, and now the murderer is newly awaken, with no memory of doing it. Ian, the Intelligent Artificial Network, is down.

The crew:

Katrina, the captain.
Wolfgang, second-in-command.
Joanna, the doctor.
Hiro, the pilot.
Paul, the programmer.
Maria, the Jack-of-all-trades.

I am in love with this book. The mystery was just so interesting, all the possible murderers enclosed together, trying to keep their secrets and motivations hidden, while also trying to figure out the others. This was so multi-layered and utterly interesting. I was fascinated by all of it, all the backstories, all the secrets, all the discussions around cloning. Honestly, the best part of the book to me was all the political and ethical discussions around cloning: how does inheritance work when one could live virtually forever? How do different religions deal with the reality of clones? What are their rights? What if there are several clones of a person living, which is the lawful one? It was so engrossing.

While I do wish one of the characters was a bit more developed (I couldn’t relate to them much), the other five were absolutely amazingly done and I was absorbed into their own personal worlds.

If you’re looking for a murder mystery with a cool twist, look no further. This is it!