white_hart

Set on a space station in a Vietnamese-influenced far future, Aliette de Bodard's The Tea Master and the Detective is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche where the Holmes figure is a woman and the Watson is a spaceship suffering from PTSD and eking out a living as a blender of medicinal teas. Consulting detective Long Chau comes to The Shadow's Child for a tea to help her remain calm in hyperspace for long enough to retrieve a corpse for scientific enquiry; when the body they retrieve turns out not to have died in an accident, Long Chau investigates and The Shadow's Child is reluctantly drawn in to help with the case.

The novella is beautifully written and the future de Bodard creates is fascinating, especially the mindships, built around an organic brain (I was reminded of Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang), revered elders of families and full participants in society. I liked both main characters, especially The Shadow's Child, and enjoyed their interactions and developing relationship. The mystery plot felt quite thin, and the resolution seemed very straightforward, but I didn't mind that as it didn't really feel as though that was the main point anyway. I see that de Bodard has written two other novellas set in this universe, so I will definitely be reading those as well.