While I was devouring this book and trying to explain it to friends, my short pitch was pregnant women solving a murder in space. This is a gross oversimplification. For one, not everyone pregnant on this spaceship is a woman, and not everyone solving the murder is pregnant–but most of space crew are, because one of the prerequisites of this desperate interstellar journey is a womb and the potential to grow the population once a new planet has been settled. This book interweaves a locked room murder mystery with the story of how and why these womb-bearing space travelers were trained and sent into space; both stories are riveting, and there are no loose ends, even the speculative elements that I thought were just aesthetic inclusions.