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This Aliette de Bodard story is every bit as good as the first one I read a while ago. In fact, I felt it was more tightly plotted, and shorter, than On a Red Station, Drifting, but it seems that book was only slightly longer than this.

At any rate, they share a setting, and at some point I will revisit it again, as the stories are well worth reading. I’d say this one could be slightly harder to get into than On a Red Station with no introduction, thanks to the viewpoint character being a ship’s intelligence stuck at a collection of habitats.

However, there is a nice melding of genres here, as a very SF setup quickly turns into a mystery with hard-boiled overtones. The Shadow’s Child is on the thin edge of bankruptcy when a new client walks through her door, and the assignment ends up generating new questions. The initial bit sets up the two characters well, but was a little difficult to get through for me. After that, the plot drives itself, and drags you along in the wake of two interesting characters.