After multiple customer recommendations for Wells's Murderbot Diaries series, I finally jumped in, and after two books I'm hooked. The books' slim size (most of them just 160 quick-turning pages) give a hint of Wells's great gift: her lightness of touch, which manages to drop you into a fascinating future world—and introduce you to a particularly fascinating main character—with just a few deft strokes. Your guide is a manufactured, near-human security android—a Murderbot, as it calls itself with typical grim humor—which has quietly gone rogue by hacking its own control system. There's plenty of action, and a gradually unfurling plot, but the best attraction is the bot itself, a drily funny and affectingly earnest and awkward machine (imagine Marvin the Paranoid Android, but with the Terminator's combat skills) that would really rather be bingeing on downloaded entertainment serials but feels obligated, by ethics and curiosity, to get to the bottom of a deepening mystery.