The 5th Gender

A cozy murder mystery in a spaceship with humans trying to understand aliens and vice-versa. And a romance between a queer detective and a lavender alien with hair tentacles. It plays with the idea of gender and sexual diversity. It’s cute and light-hearted. Warning: It has explicit sexual content.

I adore cultural contact stories, and this is one of the best I've read in ages. Here's to more stories in the same universe, o-please! A beautiful address of self-discovery and the pain of it as well, which I was not expecting. Very well put together and told.