I like science fiction a lot, but it takes a particular type of character-driven book to interest me. The Mimicking of Known Successes provides that and more.
Set in a far future when humans have moved to a new environment in a series of rings around Jupiter, these characters are involved not only in a mystery but also a relationship. While they discover the culprits they are also working to discover the depths of their relationship.
Like all good future fiction, the world is both familiar and alien to us and even a bit to our characters. One is an academic looking for ways to re-discover and then redevelop Earth into a viable planet while the other is an investigator seeking a missing person with a deep history.
I have read both this and Book 2 in this series (The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles) and look forward to reading more in the future.
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From Amazom.com…
‘The Mimicking of Known Successes presents a cozy Holmesian murder mystery and sapphic romance, set on Jupiter, by Malka Older, author of the critically-acclaimed Centenal Cycle. On a remote, gas-wreathed outpost of a human colony on Jupiter, a man goes missing.
The enigmatic Investigator Mossa follows his trail to Valdegeld, home to the colony’s erudite university—and Mossa’s former girlfriend, a scholar of Earth’s pre-collapse ecosystems.
Pleiti has dedicated her research and her career to aiding the larger effort towards a possible return to Earth. When Mossa unexpectedly arrives and requests Pleiti’s assistance in her latest investigation, the two of them embark on a twisting path in which the future of life on Earth is at stake—and, perhaps, their futures, together.”