The Spare Man, by Mary Robinette Kowal

Tor Books, ISBN 9781250829160, October 2022

This story is, basically, The Thin Man in space--a retired detective and his very rich wife, who become involved in investigating a murder. In this book, the very rich wife is Tesla Crane, a child of great wealth, but also a highly regarded and highly successful roboticist, whose career ended when a disastrous accident killed six people and left her with PTSD and chronic pain from her multiple serious injuries. The little dog is Tesla's service dog, Gimlet, a Westie, a.k.a. West Highland White Terrier. Tesla's retired detective husband is Shalmaneser Steward, called Shal. He was a working detective, and host of a reality TV series called Cold Cases. He retired when being famous made it impossible for him to blend into the background

They are recently married, and are on their honeymoon, a cruise from Earth to Mars on the ISS Lindgren.. It's a luxury cruise liner with passenger rings that offer, inward to outward, Lunar, Martian, and Earth gravity. Tesla and Shal have a luxury suite in the "Yacht Club" section of the Earth ring. On their first night aboard, they have dinner in the R-Bar, where they watch the karaoke and witness an argument involving three passengers.

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi (author), Wil Wheaton (narrator)

Audible Studios, March 2022

When covid hits New York City, and the rest of the country, Jamie Gray is stuck in a dead-end job, as a driver for food delivery apps. Barely scrapping by, Jamie is bearing most of the cost of an apartment shared with three roommates. The struggle to keep things together is about to fall apart, when an old classmate, now most regular customer, suggests that Jamie apply for a job at KJS, his own employer. He knows there's an opening, and Jamie can do the job.

I'm going to stop right here and say that Jamie's gender is never identified. This can slip right by the

 reader or listener at first, because the story is told in first person, but Jamie's gender is never identified.

Jamie goes through a grueling screening process, which certainly makes it clear the job is in a remote location, in the tropics, requiring an improbably large number of vaccinations, and cut off from any contact with civilization.

Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher (author), Amara Jasper (narrator)

Macmillan Audio, ISBN 9781250824776, April 2022

When we first meet Marra, she's building a bone dog in a barren, haunted wilderness. That's not where her story starts.

Marra is the third of three royal daughters, the youngest, the least apt, both socially and politically, but she loves her sisters and her mother. We don't hear much of her father, the king, mainly because it's the queen who has the good head for politics, and he lets her handle things.

Marra is heartbroken when her oldest sister, Damia, is married off to Prince Vorling, heir of the large and powerful Northern Kingdom, which has designs on their little harbor-focused kingdom--because of that very valuable harbor, through which so much valuable trade flows. But Damia dies far too soon after the wedding, and in mysterious circumstances, and after a year of official mourning, the next sister, Kania, is married off to him. Marra is sent off to a convent, she assumes because she's useless and will be happier there. Her mother loves her, but she hasn't lost track of the fact that Marra, too, is a royal princess. She's being kept in reserve.