But, trying to put that bias aside, The Spare Man is an okay SciFi Murder Mystery...but isn't really much more than that. The novel's standout feature is its protagonist, Tesla Crane, who struggles with physical disability and PTSD from a past disaster that basically ended her engineering career, and has to cope with her disabilities via both an internal system that allows her to regulate pain and feeling and a little Westie named Gimlet who serves her crucially as a service dog. Tesla's handicaps and her difficulties working around them are written extremely well, and give this book its sole real bit of originality (the Space Opera or SciFi Murder Mystery is hardly new) and is praiseworthy. But the rest of the setup is kind of lackluster and there's nothing really special here to make this book seem worthy of an award; nor is the murder mystery particularly compelling or solved in a super interesting fashion. It's not the worst mystery I've read, and honestly I no longer read a lot of them, but this isn't good enough for it to be more than a solid but mostly forgettable piece of science fiction for me.
Plot Summary:
Tesla Crane is famous - famous for being the heir to a famous engineering company; famous for being a brilliant inventor/engineer who designed mechs and computer systems for that company; and famous for the accidental disaster that led to deaths and her own disability. She now needs a pain management system installed in her own body to function, hasn't engineered anything in ages, and relies upon her service dog Gimlet (an adorable westie) to function, especially when her PTSD kicks in. And yet despite that all, she's constantly hounded in public because of her fame. So when her new husband Shal realizes that the two can travel on an interplanetary cruise liner incognito, without anyone recognizing who they are, she realizes that it should be the perfect honeymoon for her, where she can just relax, both in and out of the public.
Too bad a woman is murdered onboard and the body is discovered by Tesla and Shal....and then Shal is arrested by the idiots running ship security. Soon Tesla, Shal, and Gimlet find themselves going around the ship to try and figure out who really killed the victim....and who might still be out there killing and killing again. But solving the murder will require Tesla to not only shed her anonymity and take advantageous of her fame and fortune, but also to go back into engineering for the first time since the accident...and to deal with incidents and things that could trigger her PTSD and stop her from functioning. Which would be distressing normally...but it's even worse when the murderer may not be finished with one dead person.....
The Spare Man is, despite its setting in space in a very physics driven space station (whose physical details and possiblities are examined in an appendix), pretty much a straight forward locked room murder mystery. The murderer must be someone onboard the ship since no one else can have gotten on the ship since departure, there are lots of people with secrets on board the ship as well as possible connections to the murder victim, and our first accused culprit by the incompetent police equivalent is someone we know must be innocent: Shal, Tesla's spouse.
And so, as things progress, you have a pretty standard bit of mystery development: Tesla meets a bunch of characters who are all potential suspects, discovers that those characters each have secrets and alibis that may or may not stand up, runs into at least one other murder to be solved, etc. etc. And Kowal writes this fairly well, keeps the number of suspects high enough to keep up intrigue, and throws in a number of twists along the way to try to keep things fresh. But well, it's a murder mystery that's pretty much according to formula for the most part - see below - and it's a pretty beaten path, sometimes to the book's detriment (the book's obstructive security officer who refuses to listen to reason and keeps accusing Shal and Tesla and getting in their way is kind of a bad use of that trope as the officer just comes across as dumb and annoying rather than as a genuine person).
The things that make this book at least a little unique are how it deals with Tesla's disability. Tesla suffers from physical disability which hinders her movement substantially and requires her to use an implanted pain management device (that affects how much she can feel) to try and manage certain situations; the execution of this is based upon a real world deivce and it's really interesting to see how Tesla has to alter its settings. She also suffers from PTSD from the accident that caused her physical disablity and caused so much harm to others. For that (and the physical disability) she has Gimlet, her service dog - a cute little westie that Tesla relies upon and who is responsive to voice commands to change whether Gimlet is on duty or is free to be a friendly dog in search of attention. Again, the treatment of this issue is really well done, with Gimlet's behavior and actions being a centerpoint of the mystery, and is a way in which Kowal successfully makes this book a bit more interesting.
Still, it's just not really enough to make this book anything really all that special - there's also a focus on cocktails at the start of each chapter which just reads like Kowal wanted to talk cocktails for some reason rather than feeling like a natural part of the book. If you like space murder mysteries you'll probably enjoy this book...although if you've read a lot of such murder mysteries, you'll also probably be unimpressed I suspect? But it's a Hugo Nominee, somehow.
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