Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty (2016)Read about another entry on the list at Tor.com.
Interstellar travel is slow and dangerous. Therefore, prudent planners have contingency plans to deal with unexpected deaths. In the case of sleeper ship Dormouse, three light years on its way to Tau Ceti, the contingency plans center on mind tapes and cloning. Why lose a skilled crewmember forever when one can simply unbottle a fresh clone and imprint it with the memories of the dead caretaker?
Maria Arena’s latest iteration wakes to discover that the ship, and its cloning system, has been attacked. Person or persons unknown massacred the entire crew, sabotaged Dormouse’s AI, and sent the ship off-course. Even the cloning system was targeted: The clones have the memories of their predecessors, but those memories are years out of date. Working out the killer’s identity and their motive will therefore be challenging. Good news, though: The suspect list is quite short. Because the passengers are in cold sleep and Sol is three light years away, the killer or killers must have been crew themselves.
Six Wakes is among Edward Ashton's eight books about what it means to be human and Elisa Shoenberger's seven top SFF murder mysteries.
--Marshal Zeringue
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