At about half the size of the full novel that was Network Effect, Fugitive Telemetry does a great job at combining the key ingredients to a Murderbot novel: mystery, robot action, corporation critiques and heavy doses of sarcasm. Additionally, Station Security provides great secondary characters to converse with Murderbot that is typically missing, and it's those interactions that are the highlight of this novel.

The biggest failing is that Fugitive Telemetry is chronologically set before the events of Network Effect. Once you get over that disappointment, Murderbot will narrate you through his challenges dealing with humans for a long enough time that I didn't mind the shorter novel. It's like everything was sized down perfectly to fit the page count, and I appreciate that since the previous novella didn't do it for me.

Recommended.

Not going to lie - I completely blanked on the mystery and how to solve it. It was just a bit too complicated and rooted in the technology of the future... which I liked because crimes use modern flaws to succeed, and Martha Wells appears to have grokked her world enough to find those flaws. But for us readers, it's not so easy to understand the limits of SecSys and the like.

I think it's possible to guess at the mystery earlier, but I'm not sure. When the solution was revealed, I was like "huh" instead of "oohhhhh". And that's where I knocked a star off the book.