Review: Alibi, by Sharon Shinn

Review: Alibi, by Sharon Shinn

by Rich Horton

Sharon Shinn's new novel, Alibi, features, as it says right on the cover, "Romance. Teleportation. Murder."  I confess I had thought of Shinn as mostly a fantasy writer. (I've read her novel General Winston's Daughter, which I quite enjoyed, and I have a couple of her Elemental Blessings novels on my TBR pile, and those are all fantasy.) But this book is nearish future science fiction, and quite effectively so. The words above suggests it's at once a romance novel, a murder mystery, and SF -- and that's fair enough, but I think the SF part dominates. (Well, and the character interactions -- not just the love story but an extensive network of family, friends, students, etc.) 

The novel was published in November 2024, by Fairwood Press. I bought my copy at World Fantasy this year, and was able to have Sharon Shinn sign it for me. (Sharon and I both live in St. Louis, and we have known each other for some time, and indeed we both did a writing workshop for philosophers at Saint Louis University a couple of years ago.)

The book is set some decades in the future. The main novum is teleportation -- the whole world seems connected by an enormous network of teleportation booths. Air travel is as far as I can tell nonexistent (perhaps there are cargo flight?) and the airports have become hubs for longer distance teleportation, but the cities are webbed with booths as well, and sufficiently wealthy people might even have booths in their homes. And, very skillfully presented in the background, there is a good deal of subtle speculation about just how this technology changes people's lives.

The first person narrator is Taylor Kendall, a thirty-something native of Chicago who now teaches at a private school in Houston. She lives in Houston and teaches in person there, but because of the teleportation, she can keep in constant touch with her best friend in Atlanta, and her family in Chicago. After a brief prologue establishing that there will be a murder, and that Taylor will be a suspect, we go back a few months, when Taylor is offered a job as a private tutor to the 19 year old son of Duncan Phillips, an extremely rich man who lives in Chicago. Taylor takes the job, and begins to teach Quentin Phillips, and quickly comes to like him. The kicker is that he suffers from a degenerative disease, and isn't expected to live much more than five more years. But he's an eager and engaging boy, and Taylor becomes very invested in his life.

Quentin's father is mostly absent, and so Taylor's interactions are with his staff -- Francis, the steward, Bram, the head of security, and Dennis, Quentin's physical therapist. It is quickly clear that all three men love Quentin and hate his father. Soon Taylor becomes part of sort of a circle of protectors of Quentin -- and when she meets Duncan Phillips, she realizes why the others hate him -- and also realizes that he is particularly dangerous, and creepy, to women. 

The novel then follows Taylor's tutoring of Quentin, her interactions with the three men on Duncan's staff (especially Bram, as sparks quickly fly between he and Taylor -- different people but both wary of relationships after unsuccessful marriages); her professional life as an English teacher (with some crises involving her students,) and her social life, centered on her friend Marika, her brother Jason, and his friend Domenic. All this is in a way mundane, but it's very enjoyable, and all along we get glimpses both of the teleportation-affected society, and of Quentin's prospects and how they are affected by his distant father. There are romances for a few of the characters, and hints of hope for Quentin's future.

And then, surprisingly late in the novel for a murder mystery, the murder happens. And from there things rush towards a conclusion. There is some nice misdirection about the killer, with of course teleportation involved in providing -- or removing -- alibis for the characters; and an exciting (if just slightly convenient) resolution, with a surprising (but not unfair) solution to the mystery.

I really enjoyed Alibi. It's fair to say that the opening is a bit of a slow burn -- but appropriately so -- and before long, even while in a curious way little happens but ordinary (future) life, the novel becomes quite absorbing. We root for the characters, we care about them, and we believe their interactions. And the conclusion is quite satisfying.