STAR BUREAU

STAR BUREAU: MURDER ON ALPHA 1
Book One of the Star Bureau Series

Three thousand one hundred and six people. One body. No precedent.

Alpha 1 is humanity's first city in orbit - 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 ended in a sealed maintenance shaft on the hub ring.

The Star Bureau is fourteen months old. It has no case law, no forensic lab above the atmosphere, and not one page of procedure for a homicide nobody ever expected to happen. It sends the only two men it has.

Francis "Tugger" Brennan has stood over two thousand bodies in twenty-seven years and has an opinion about every one of them.

Bill Martin is eleven weeks into the job, has never been off-planet, and was recruited for the habit his last lieutenant wrote up twice as a liability.

They have a victim with no wound. Nine minutes missing from a camera record that cannot fail. A station administrator who booked their return shuttle before they docked. And three thousand neighbors in a closed town where not one person can remember anything about the dead man.

Then the evidence starts disappearing - legally, on schedule, with the paperwork filed correctly.

By the time Brennan and Martin understand what was done to Emil Vashti, the question is no longer who killed him. It's who wanted them to look.

A locked-room mystery in a place with no doors.