Book of the Day

From the review

Isako has already picked the spot where she plans to die. On the frozen planet where she's spent forty years working contract security for one company, walking out into the ice until your legs give out counts as retirement, and the distance you cover before you drop sets the payout your family collects. Fonda Lee spends exactly one scene making sure you feel that cold before the plot even starts moving, and by the end of it you understand this economy in your bones. Isako is ready to make that walk. Then her old boss dies before she can, and the company gets specific about wanting her alive a little longer. The contract that keeps her breathing runs straight through Martim, the one apprentice she trained who never should have made it this far. He was sloppy with a blade and worse with people, and now he's sitting somewhere near the top of the company that used to own both their lives. Isako's assignment is supposed to be simple protection work, and for about a chapter, it is. Then the file underneath it gets thicker. By two hundred pages in she's untangling a scheme that runs through the technology keeping the planet's executives alive well past the age they should be dead, while the workers under them get thinner contracts and colder deaths. Lee builds the mystery like a locksmith building a lock, one small tumbler at a time, and every reveal recontextualizes a scene you thought you understood twenty pages back.