I can’t remember why this was on my list (a quick CBR search tells me it wasn’t a rec from here), but I couldn’t find it anywhere. I requested my local library order a copy of it, and they DID. Now I am drunk with power, and want to flood my library with niche things only I will read. MWAHAHAHAHAAHAA!
Anyway, I hope they’re glad they added it to their catalog, because it was really good. Hester Marley was on a spaceship with a bunch of her fellow scientists, off to Titan to study sciency space stuff. A saboteur tries (and mostly succeeds) to blow up the ship, leading Hester’s life’s work ruined, most of her friends dead, and herself minus an arm, a leg, and an eye. The closest help to the disaster was a Parthenope ship. Parthenope is a mining company that makes millions off its workers and draconian contracts. Its doctors patch Hester up with prosthetic parts (while also creepily trying to ‘upsell’ her with parts that match her skin tone; she elects to stick with the basic metal), but also with an insurmountable debt to work off. She’s working in a Parthenope crime lab, trying to earn her freedom, when she gets a mysterious message from a fellow scientist survivor. When he’s murdered the very next day, she gets herself put on the case.
It’s a pretty good mystery, with lots of good suspects as well as red herrings, of the human and AI varieties. Some of the other characters are pretty thin (I would’ve liked to know more about the detective she’s working with – he seemed intriguing), but Hester herself is great. Out of her element, flawed, damaged, but committed to finding the truth and doing the right thing, even when the problem becomes way, way higher than her pay grade.