A Maze of Death - Philip K. Dick

Fourteen people receive orders to transfer to a new world, letting them escape from what all considered humdrum and useless lives. Except, once on the new world, none of them know what they're supposed to be doing. There are electronic bugs that watch them, and a Building that moves and that they all fear to approach too closely.

Then people start getting murdered.

I don't know that I really cared about any of them, exactly. The character the book opens with is the first to go, and as I found him more likeable than the second character they introduced, that wasn't a great start. Then they start dying so quickly, you hardly have time to get enough sense of them to care. Someone dies and you try to remember if they were the linguist or the theologian, the self-medicator or the one who sleeps around.

But there are aspects of all of their behavior that felt very real. The self-absorption, just wanting to talk about the things they're interested in. The way most of them don't really want to be in charge, but aren't sure about letting anyone else be in charge of them, either. The lies they tell to each other and themselves. Most of the book is from Seth Morley's perspective, and he'll frequently pretend he knows things he doesn't. Mostly to not appear ignorant, but sometimes because he thinks the lie will be comforting.

There's a lot about religion, the relationship between Man and God. Or how people perceive that relationship, the different explanations they come up with for why things work out as they do. The particular hoops you have to jump through to get what you want. The people who believe, the ones who don't, the ones who do but want to pretend they don't because, I guess they're afraid of looking foolish. They can claim they were a skeptic or a believer all along, whichever way it plays out.

'Belsnor said, "I have no faith in prayer that's not electronically augmented. Even Spectowsky admitted that; if a prayer is to be effective it must be electronically transmitted through the network of god-worlds so all Manifestations are reached."'