I greatly enjoyed this book—significantly more than book one! It has the same entertaining main characters as book one in the series, but this time they are more settled and established. While their relationship isn't a given thing, exactly, it's a lot more stable than it was in book one, and I enjoyed the exploration of the relationship as much as I enjoyed the mystery and denouement of the plot.

This is, in many ways, a cozy mystery SFF mash-up. It combines a lot of things I've been enjoying in my fiction right now: cozy vibes, a mystery to solve, Holmesian character connections, and an established relationship between the main characters. (Also first person single POV narration. I've been enjoying that lately.) ( )

I so much enjoy the fictional Oxbridge atmosphere of the Pleiti's university. ( )

Pleiti is delighted to learn that Investigator Mossa is coming to visit her at Valdegeld University. Recently they had worked together on a missing person case, The Mimicking of Known Successes, that had uncovered malfeasance in the highest ranks of the University. Although the malefactor had escaped their pursuit by fleeing in a rocket ship back to the devastated planet Earth, he has recently been pronounced dead.

That case had not only renewed their romantic relationship but gave scholar Pleti a change to use her skills in detective work, instead of researching the civilization of the planet abandoned by humanity centuries ago when the survivors escaped its ecological collapsed to settle around Jupiter and its moons. Valdegeld is situated on a vast artificial satellite encircling the giant gas planet, Jupiter, or as they say, Giant.

This new case will lead the two investigators, the official police investigator and the amateur one, off the satellite platform, onto the moon Io and back to the far side of Giant and will reveal not only more corruption in the University, but also confront Pleiti with gruesome death, when she again plays an erudite Watson to her lover’s Holmes. ( )

Investigating one missing university student, Mossa schedules her arrival to spend time with Pleiti. Pleiti is not entirely comfortable or confident in her relationship with Mossa and goes through a bit more angst about it than I enjoyed. In what turns out to be over a dozen disappearances and eventually one murder, Pleiti works to give context and detail to what Mossa discovers, showing them to be a good team as well as an affectionate, if awkwardly so, pair. ( )

While I find this novella to be almost as good as the first book in what appears to be an open-ended series, the emphasis is on the almost, as Inspector Mossa has another missing person case to investigate, and Scholar Pleiti is along for the ride. Again, for me, the world that Older is building is the real character here, and I do have to wonder when noticeable diminishing returns are going to set in; hopefully Older is able to keep things fresh for awhile. ( )