While Long Chau tries to discover the truth of what happened to the body, The Shadow’s Child starts her own investigation into the background of Long Chau.īy this point of the story, the dynamic was starting to feel a little familiar – and if you’re following along, you might be starting to feel the same. But with bills to pay, The Shadow’s Child can’t afford to reject her new customer so despite her reservations about travelling back into deep space, she monitors Long Chau on her retrieval mission – which then suddenly pivots into a murder investigation. This request makes The Shadow’s Child wary, as even a skilled tea master would be reluctant to brew anything for someone with such an apparent drug dependency as Long Chau. She asks The Shadow’s Child to brew her a tea to keep her calm and to reduce her mental fuzziness while she recovers a corpse from deep space a sort of sea of unreality which allows faster-than-light travel. Long Chau – The Detective – is one of The Shadow’s Child’s more enigmatic customers. Instead, in the manner of an impoverished compounding chemist, she now makes a meagre living brewing travellers special teas that have mind-altering effects.

The Shadow’s Child used to be involved in the military, but after losing her crew, she appears to be suffering from PTSD. They can also project human-shaped avatars of themselves into human habitations to socialise or do business. Shipminds are partly human grown by alchemists in laboratories, their bodies are implanted into the heartrooms of space-faring vessels where they act as the control centre. The Tea Master of the title is a shipmind called The Shadow’s Child.

And while I know you’re told not to judge a book by its cover, can you blame me here? We have a detective story, and it involves an expert in tea! And it’s in a kind of futuristic East Asian inspired setting - in space! What’s not to love? I confess, I picked this book up based on 1) my reading of Aliette de Bodard’s Children of Thorns, Children of Water last year - and no, I never did get around to writing a review for it, unfortunately and 2) the combination of the title and the cover.

So rather than deciding whether or not I need to pick up the next book in this series, I now need to decide if I should go back and start from the start. Thankfully, most of the books in the Xuya Universe can be read as stand alones, because as it turns out, I picked one of the more recent entries. In the case of Aliette de Bodard’s The Tea Master and The Detective, I didn’t so much choose to start a new series as much as I stumbled into one. With my last review, of Pierce Brown’s Red Rising, I spent a bit of time musing on what might helps you decide whether or not to start new book series, and what compels you to continue.

The tea master and the detective