The First Resort is a state-of-the-art refuge for the 1%, a space station that allows them to live the comfortable lives they feel they deserve while the rest of us are left to deal with Earth and the effects climate change have had on it. The best the rest of us can hope for is to be employees on the First Resort, making the 1% feel secure and better about themselves while they nickel and dime us for every aspect of our existence. But hey, it's still better than being back on Earth.

Station Security Liaison Elise is one of First Resort's employees, and she has a problem. Well, many problems, but her biggest one right now is that someone has gruesomely killed CFO Alberto Fairmilk and she has approximately zero training in figuring out who did it. Also, she has a drug problem - she'd really like to get clean, but she absolutely does not have time for withdrawal symptoms right now. Granted, she also doesn't have time to be blissed out on Blue.

The dark humor was part of what drew me to this graphic novel. The back-and-forth between Elise and St. Brigid, the station AI, was great - Elise was a disaster doing her best to push her horror under the surface so that her employers wouldn't realize how useless she was in this situation, and it wasn't always easy to tell whether St. Brigid was being serious or wryly humorous, but either way, I loved their conversations.

The killer was pretty obvious - I'm not sure anyone would have been able to commit some of the murders that happened in this volume (how was that scene with the lungs and the talking even possible??), but if anyone was going to be able to manage it, it was clear who it was. However, this wasn't just about whodunnit, but also about the world in which these characters lived.

The artwork wasn't really to my taste, and the shifts from one scene to the next could be extremely choppy, to the point that I had to reread the page to figure out what happened and whether we were in a new scene. I was still mostly able to follow along with the story, but it did detract slightly from my enjoyment.

Overall, I enjoyed this, although I'm still not sure how I feel about the ending. Warning: it's extremely dark. (I mean, probably not surprising in a graphic novel that starts with murder victim whose skin was removed in two whole pieces, but still.) At the same time...we currently have billionaires happily taking trips into space while the people who work for their companies can't find affordable housing or healthcare, so...

Extras:

An afterword by Sarah Gailey and Liana Kangas, a cover art gallery, character designs, and a few sketches.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) ( )