The Tea Master and the Detective

by Aliette de Bodard

Overview

Aliette de Bodard brings us a new novella set in the award-winning, critically acclaimed Xuya universe!

Welcome to the Scattered Pearls Belt, a collection of ring habitats and orbitals ruled by exiled human scholars and powerful families, and held together by living mindships who carry people and freight between the stars. In this fluid society, human and mindship avatars mingle in corridors and in function rooms, and physical and virtual realities overlap, the appearance of environments easily modified and adapted to interlocutors or current mood.

A transport ship discharged from military service after a traumatic injury, The Shadow's Child now ekes out a precarious living as a brewer of mind-altering drugs for the comfort of space-travellers. Meanwhile, abrasive and eccentric scholar Long Chau wants to find a corpse for a scientific study. When Long Chau walks into her office, The Shadow's Child expects an unpleasant but easy assignment. When the corpse turns out to have been murdered, Long Chau feels compelled to investigate, dragging The Shadow's Child with her.

As they dig deep into the victim's past, The Shadow's Child realises that the investigation points to Long Chau's own murky past--and, ultimately, to the dark and unbearable void that lies between the stars...

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159024312
Publisher:	Subterranean Press
Publication date:	03/31/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	258,655
File size:	942 KB

Editorial Reviews

This isn't a tidy transposition of Holmes and Watson into far-future space, for all that the elements of homage (Long Chau is an abrasive self-medicating "consulting detective") shine through. The Shadow's Child is a fully realized character in her own right, and the dislike she feels for Long Chau is sustained and justified. Instead it's a window onto a beautifully developed world that widens the meaning of space opera, one that centers on Chinese and Vietnamese cultures and customs instead of Western military conventions, and is all the more welcome for it.

The New York Times Book Review - Amal El-Mohtar