The Tea Master and the Detective

 The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard, 86 pages.

The Shadow's Child is a mindship, a sentient spaceship made with alchemy. After a traumatic event in Deep Spaces, she becomes a tea master, responsible for brewing teas that chemically alter the brain for easier long distance space travel. She is struggling to make rent on her office space, so when a mysterious woman asks her to go back into Deep Spaces for quite a lot of money, she has little choice but to accept. Soon she is pulled not only into the mysteries of her strange customer, but also of a dead woman.

This was the Orcs and Aliens book for last month, and I'm afraid the consensus wasn't very positive. While the Vietnamese-inspired sci-fi setting is new and interesting, the world building was thin enough to leave me constantly confused about basic aspects required to understand the plot. The mystery was also very lacking. Long Chau, the strange customer, is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche that feels derivative rather than interesting. This is pitched like a sci-fi mystery, but the mystery is so deprioritized by the book there are very few clues to engage with, and it doesn't even feel like the most important thing going on to The Shadow's Child. This is my second book read in this universe, and I don't believe I'm likely to try a third.