I enjoyed Nobody’s Baby, the second novella in Olivia Waite’s Dorothy Gentleman space-opera detective series, although I advise against jumping in here without context; go back and read the first one first. The story has an interesting premise that explores some of the questions that Murder by Memory had raised for me, while making me wonder more about others; meanwhile, I enjoyed finding out more about how protagonist Dorothy and her connections are doing. Some romantic and other storylines supplement the somewhat slight mystery, and it was a pretty cozy read, all in all.
As seen in Murder by Memory, Dorothy Gentleman is a detective on the Fairweather, a sort of generation spaceship, except that instead of having babies, when people get old or die, they just upload themselves into new clone-bodies. I’d wondered while reading that whether there were any children on the ship, but it turns out in Nobody’s Baby that the answer had been no, with all the passengers metabolically altered for the duration journey — except that as the plot here shows, the process turns out not to be foolproof.
This second novella starts off with Dorothy called to help her nephew Ruthie and his romantic partner John. As in the classic movie trope (and shared stories do play a large part in the plot), someone had rung their doorbell and fled, leaving a basket with a baby in it. After Dorothy shows the hapless former bachelors how to feed the baby, so it temporarily stops crying, she starts looking into the mystery.
Using medical logs and other ship records, Dorothy quickly finds out the baby’s genetic heritage, but its origins are still swaddled in mystery. There’s a highly suspicious gap in the memory of someone who really ought to know what happened, so Dorothy has to do a bit of digging to find out the motives of several people involved (or not) with this little bundle of joy.
There are several other threads running through the fabric of this story. First is the way that Ruthie and John’s relationship evolves as they start taking care of their unexpected, and extremely noisy, guest. Second is the baby’s legal status; Dorothy wants him treated as a passenger, with full upload/self-cloning rights, but others suggest he should be treated as a stowaway or a future planetary citizen (who wouldn’t be entitled to memory uploads or body replacements). Third is the will-they-won’t-they relationship between Dorothy and someone she met during the previous novella’s investigation, who lacks Dorothy’s respect for regulations and orderliness.
There are some unpleasant characters in the story, but Dorothy finds out their transgressions and deals with them publicly, in ways she considers satisfactory and sufficient. The baby’s status also has a happy ending, and I’ll leave the relationship dance for readers to discover.
The person I feel the most sympathy with is John, because Ruthie almost immediately decides that he and John will apply for custody and raise the baby, apparently without asking John’s opinion about this. John tells Dorothy later that when you love someone, a little compromise is necessary, but this seems like a really big deal to me. I guess 20-odd years of commitment to a kid (plus a lifetime relationship, hopefully) may seem less extreme to someone who’s already been on a ship for 307 years and expects quite a few centuries more of life, but the fact that Ruthie assumed instead of asking makes me cringe a bit.
Nobody’s Baby supplies the reader with a few more snippets of worldbuilding, but I’m hungry for more. When I read Murder by Memory, I was wistful to know more about what led up to the Fairweather’s launching; I knew various aspects of life onboard had been set up to hinder accumulation of personal wealth, but not about how things got started. Now my appetite has been whetted with more hints about the unsettling origin of the journey. Are the passengers escaping natural disasters, economic turmoil, or something more sinister? Is the Fairweather humanity’s only hope, or one of many spaceships fleeing to different directions? I don’t know, but Waite knows how to keep me interested.
The prose is immersive, with never a weird word choice to pull me out of the story. By turns efficient and thoughtful, it occasionally sparkles with nifty metaphors and wonderful phrasing.
The length of Nobody’s Baby surprised me a little; it’s 144 pages, as opposed to Murder by Memory‘s 112, and yet the second book felt shorter to me than the first had. I suppose I feel that way because the mystery is a little less complicated, and I didn’t have to work as hard to figure out what was going on in either the plot or the worldbuilding. Still, I reread my eARC after a gap of a month without being bored in the slightest, so it’s not quite such a cozy little mystery that it ends up being weightless. But I do sincerely hope that eventually we readers will find out the story behind the Embarkation that launched the Fairweather’s journey.
Nobody’s Baby is scheduled for released March 10, 2026; you can read an excerpt here.
Content warnings: Abandonment issues, control issues, attempted abduction, personhood on trial, and a crime I can’t talk about without being too spoilery.
Disclaimer: I received a free eARC of this book from NetGalley.
