I guess I reserve the right to change my mind if I read the book again and noticed something I missed, but currently the lack of resolution to Zat's murder is really bothering me.
Or rather. I'd prefer that given the information in the book, we officially had a lack of resolution, rather than "Hevom did it, obviously".
Because we haven't heard anything since Ingray insisting (repeatedly) that Hevom must have done it, I think the logical conclusion is that the narrative says Hevom must have done it.
But this is terrible, both plot-wise and thematically.
Plot: the only suspects named by anyone are those who were present in the park, and we are apparently meant to believe that one of those suspects must have committed the murder, even though the murder was committed with the use of a mech. Mechs do not need to be nearby to be piloted; the Geck mechs can be piloted from orbit, and it's possible that this is unusual but I don't think the range of Zat's Uto mech was ever discussed. Perhaps it could have been piloted from say the nearest town (surely Zat and Hevom didn't have to be the only Omkem on the planet) or even programmed ahead of time, since we see some mechs do things like walk up to people, introduce themselves, and perform escort duties without being piloted. I think both possibilities shouldn't be ruled out without some sort of explanation.
Ditto for the possibility of it being a suicide -- probably by programming rather than piloting, but who knows.
I do also feel like while Hevom potentially has motive to murder Zat, he does need a sort of extra robust motivation to commit murder and break the family taboo that the Omkem have. Like Chenns said, for the Omkem it's something like patricide, not impossible but repugnant to a degree significantly past ordinary murder.
(This wouldn't necessarily hold if there was a plan for someone else to murder Zat, with the expectation that Hevom would take the fall for it and that the Omkem could get good and outraged over that, because of course an affine would never do that and of course the Hwaeans wouldn't understand. But Hevom himself? Too much risk that he'd freak out and decide not to, if we're assuming he was put up to it by someone else. So much easier to just have someone else chilling out in that hostel or whatever it was called in Eswae, and piloting the Uto from a distance.)
And it does strike me as odd that Hevom would choose the same day he murdered Zat to complain to someone else about her. Unless I suppose he was supposed to do that, to ensure Planetary Security decided he was guilty? Seems unnecessarily convoluted.
Finally, what was the deal with the knife? That doesn't seem to make sense from any perspective. The marker spike was the murder weapon, the marker spike was always going to be discovered as the murder weapon, why bother also stabbing her? It's just kind of left hanging and unexplained; narratively it offers a reason to make Garal temporarily a suspect and also show off another cool mech technology thing, but why the actual murderer (whoever it was!) would have done that...it doesn't really get resolved.
Theme: thematically it's much worse. This story is about legitimacy, veracity, where things (or people) come from, and what it means when something you thought was real isn't. Putting a murder mystery into that sort of story, well, you need to be pretty careful to avoid making sloppy assumptions, yeah? And yet we have several terrible assumptions: that it's extremely important to identify the murderer, that the only people who could have committed the murder are people the police have identified as suspects, and that it is impossible to just decide there's not enough evidence to reasonably convict anyone of murder.
I do wonder how many innocent people, in the real world, are convicted of major crimes because jury members are reluctant to just let a murder be unresolved, and they know that the defendant is the cops' best guess, so if they don't convict nobody else is going to get convicted. It's understandable. It feels wrong to just...not have anyone be punished for a crime that definitely happened. To know that the murderer is still out there. Unsatisfying. And yet, when people aren't willing to let themselves remain unsatisfied in this way, the alternative is to decide that "well, this person is more likely than anyone else to have done it" is enough to ruin someone's life over. Which is, uh, not exactly "innocent until proven guilty" and "beyond a shadow of a doubt."
(And doesn't actually fix the "sometimes murderers walk free" problem. If you convict someone who didn't do it, the murderer does indeed walk free, and presumably that happens more often when the burden of proof is lower. It prioritizes perception of safety over reality, and over the well-being of the falsely convicted. Murder is not the only thing people can be in danger of.)
It's just very frustrating to go from the Imperial Raadch trilogy, where the characters are complex and many of the characters we like have killed before (under morally and sometimes legally dubious circumstances), and where someone who actually attempted normal peace-time murder gets basically let off with a warning and this is presented as a good outcome, to a storyline where we're expected to believe that the ideal way to keep a character we like from getting convicted of murder is to insist that someone else did it, when there is blatantly not enough evidence to prove that said other character did it either. And significant reason to think he didn't.
I feel disappointed. I want the story to make more sense than this. I want it to care more about justice than this.
