NEW GORDIAN DIVISION NOVEL: When a top engineer on Saturn commits suicide, Detective Isaac Cho and Special Agent Susan Cantrell are called in to review the case. But what seems like an open-and-shut case spirals into the strange. And if Cho and Cantrell don't solve the mystery soon, they may be the next ones to wind up dead.
The Atlas Corporation was all set to tear apart the planet Mercury—converting its resources into a swarm of solar-collecting megastructures—when Esteban Velasco, lead Atlas engineer, is found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
Detective Isaac Cho and Special Agent Susan Cantrell, both eager to return to active duty despite close calls on their last case, are sent in to assess the situation. Their superiors expect a simple declaration of suicide, but Velasco’s death proves anything but typical.
The detectives soon find themselves embroiled in a mystery far more complex—and strange—than anyone expected, leading them to a church for Mercury-loving weirdos, a “nudist” colony open to Saturn’s unbreathable atmosphere, an exclusive park for hunting dinosaurs, and a ghost town where forgotten machines wage war over condo floorplans.
What was meant to be an easy return to duty for the detectives takes a sudden dark turn when ruthless mind-hackers ambush and nearly kill them, making one fact crystal clear:
If they don’t solve this case soon, it’ll be their corpses that turn up next.