The Obake Code

The Obake Code by Makana Yamamoto, 352 pages

Three years after her "last heist," hacker Malia is getting bored with fixing cyber fights and living off the spoils. Convenient, then, that gangsters catch her redhanded and force her to help take down a crooked politician by stealing and decrypting some incriminating documents. However, after getting her crew together, Malia gains the attention of Maddox, a man who performed illegal experiments on her as a child. Yes, those experiments made her the best hacker around, but they also caused a world of mental, physical, and emotional trauma. So Maddox's arrival as right-hand man to the politician astronomically complicates the heist.

This was billed as a standalone novel in the world of Hammajang Luck (Yamamoto's first novel), and while you can read it without reading that first book, I don't really think you should. There are lots of references to the first book, and since I hadn't read it, I was left feeling like I was missing something. The vibes of the criminal crew skew toward The Fast & the Furious (especially with the prevalence of cruising and car thefts going on in the story), and honestly, the drama with Maddox overwhelmed the plot to the point where I forgot what they were meant to be stealing by the time they got there. So cool vibes and a decent found family, but maybe not the best heist novel out there.

Station Eternity

Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty, 456 pages

For her entire life, Mallory has been a magnet for murder. Literally. She can't stay in one place longer than a year or two before a murder occurred in her vicinity. She never committed the crime, and she almost always helped solve it, but that hasn't kept various law enforcement agencies from harassing her. So when the opportunity arises for her to quite literally leave humanity behind and become one of three humans on the sentient space station Eternity, Mallory jumps at the chance. But the arrival of a shuttle full of human tourists arrives, so does murder, and once again, Mallory must solve the crime, this time against the backdrop of a breached space station and internal conflict among Eternity's many alien races.

This book was described to me as "Murder, She Wrote in space," and to a degree, that's accurate. Mallory and Xan (a former military quartermaster and current refugee on Eternity) are compelling characters, and I loved their backstories. However, there might be a few too many characters to keep track of — particularly when you add in the various alien life forms (though I dug the fact that the universal translator gave the giant rock-like Gneiss names like "Stephanie" and "Tina") — and the plot was thus a bit confusing. I have a feeling Lafferty is going to write more books with Mallory and I can only hope that the setting and characters are settled enough from this book that the mystery can shine through.