Serving Jury Duty by playing in Paradise? Sounds great. Well, there are a few weird rules, but no matter, a vacation is a vacation. Oh, wait, the trial involves a potentially alive and vengeful machine? How bizarre! And then it gets strange. ( )

This novella was very interesting! A kitchen which can create meals based on the users preferences and needs, a wife with means and motive.... who killed the husband? And to make matters worse, the jury is a "vacation jury" on a holiday island.

The book was very well written, and even though a few people thought the ending was a bit rushed or a let down, I quite enjoyed the ending, the way it left you thinking and didn't quite tie all the loose ends up and left a few things open to interpretation. ( )

I enjoyed reading this novella. I found it had a new and refreshing story line on the classic SF conundrum of when does artificial intelligence become a legal entity and when is it responsible for its own actions. Was it a murder, and if so who did it? Was it the kitchen?

The tale is told from the perspective of a trial based on a whole new way of implementing a judicial system. The vacation jury system is a key part of the plot and is an interesting element.

Unfortunately, for me, the ending was a big let down. For a whodunnit, which in some measure this is, I think it is reasonable to expect the author to provide a resolution (whether or not I might agree with the result). But this was too open-ended for me.

Overall though, I am glad I read the book. ( )

A new twist on murder. https://www.amazon.com/gp/review/RLBSFRYD0T5H2 ( )

From the very first paragraph, the reader of Murder in the Generative Kitchen is drawn into the drama of a courtroom of the near future populated by telepresence robots. The human judge, jurors and attorneys are all elsewhere, remotely controlling their surrogates; only the defendant attends in person. The purpose of this is to remove bias from the proceedings - the juror bots are faceless and genderless; the judge and attorney bots, distinguished by their differing colors, are expressionless and transmit their jurist's voices in metallic monotones.

The actual human jurors are all ensconced in a "Vacation Jury Resort Hotel," in this case in Acapulco, as the actual courtroom holding the bots is in sub-zero Chicago. While the jurors have the many perks of a vacation holiday atmosphere and locale, they also live under the usual restrictions of a trial jury - they can't communicate with each other during the trial and they have to watch every moment of the proceedings (though it is recorded footage that they each view on their own schedule, as long as they each finish the seven hour stream every day. There's plenty of time left for enjoying the beach and restaurants.)

The protagonist of the story is one of the jurors, Julio González. He must resolve two distinct conflicts:

1. Determine the innocence or guilt of the defendant, who has been accused of poisoning her husband,
2. Manage his overwhelming sexual attraction to another juror, while remaining under the judicial strictures.

The conflict posed by the trial is the more interesting of the two as it hangs on the predicament of determining whether the defendant poisoned her husband by manipulating the artificial intelligence that automates her kitchen, which supplied the poison, or whether the kitchen AI did it on its own as it attempted to deduce the needs and desires of its owners. There are distinct parallels between this fictional quandary and the present legal problems of self-driving cars.

This story raises some terrifically interesting questions about determining the responsibility for the decisions made by an artificial intelligence. The setting for this problem is appropriately science fictional, though one wonders how a vacation jury in an exotic setting would ever be realistic in a near-future America. Rather it seems more to be a gimmick solely designed to provide the opportunity for the protagonist to be attracted to a stunning fellow juror while each remain remote from the courtroom. The actions and attitudes of the jurors during their deliberation are quite realistically portrayed. I sat on the jury for an attempted murder trial and the fictional jury's depiction invoked a string sense of déjà vu for me! Unfortunately, the less interesting (because it's much more trite) conflict of unrequited lust is given the most attention in this story and its outcome is the most predictable, while the existential dilemma of assigning responsibility for an AI's actions is given short shrift in a rushed conclusion. The story would definitely benefit by being lengthened to fully develop and conclude the trial's central conflict.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. ( )