Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Exit Strategy [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Martha Wells, book 4 of the Murderbot Diaries series.

“Possibly I was overthinking this. I do that; it’s the anxiety that comes with being a part-organic murderbot. The upside was paranoid attention to detail. The downside was also paranoid attention to detail.” (14)

As I had hoped, the fourth Murderbot Diaries volume did break the hardening pattern of the previous books. It is not a matter of the SecUnit adopting a new “family” and protecting them from malefactors. Instead, it concerns Murderbot taking up unresolved relations with humans it knew before, and trying to address a crisis it knows itself to have helped create in the first place.

Although it was a little bit longer than the earlier books, it read even faster, and I basically tore through this one in a single, lightly-interrupted sitting.