Peter Hastings
Alpha 1 is humanity’s first city in orbit: three thousand one hundred and six people living two hundred and fifty miles above the Pacific, with three schools, a chapel for every faith aboard, and eighteen months without a single death.That record ends in a sealed maintenance shaft on the hub ring.The Star Bureau - the treaty agency chartered to police human activity beyond Earth - is fourteen months old. It has no case law, no forensic laboratory above the atmosphere, and no written procedure for a homicide nobody anticipated. It sends the only two officers it has.Francis 'Tugger' Brennan is a forensic pathologist on secondment from the FBI Laboratory Division, twenty-seven years and two thousand bodies into a career he had expected to finish quietly. Bill Martin is eleven weeks into the job, a Baltimore homicide detective recruited for the interviewing habit his last lieutenant twice recorded as a liability.They find a victim with no wound, nine minutes missing from a camera system that cannot fail, and a station administrator who booked their return passage before they docked. Then the evidence begins to disappear - lawfully, on schedule, under regulations correctly cited and properly filed.By the time Brennan and Martin understand what was done to Emil Vashti, the question is no longer who killed him, but who intended them to look.Murder on Alpha 1 is a procedural set at the moment institutions outrun the rules written to govern them. It will appeal to readers of near-future science fiction and to readers of legal and investigative crime fiction, and is the first novel in the Star Bureau series.
