Blackmail Under a Dark Star: Space Opera Noir on Star City (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781943403448)

A Wisconsin native, Greg Fowlkes received his master's degree in physics from the University of Wisconsin. Since graduation, he has had a career developing telecommunications software. A lifelong reader of science fiction and fantasy, he began writing while still in graduate school, though it would be several decades until his first work, The Fictional Detective, was published. This was soon followed by the collection of novellas, The Laws of Magic, and the novel The Blood Red Sands of Mars. His work explores the conjunction of science fiction, fantasy, and the hard-boiled detective stories. His series includes Murder on Mars novels, which focus on a law enforcement team on a Martian colony in the not-too-distant future; the Wizard at Law stories, which deal with a lawyer with an unusual set of clients; and The Fictional Detective stories and novel about a hard-boiled detective with existential issues. His latest series, the Star City Stories, features a private detective whose beat is a hollowed out asteroid orbiting a brown dwarf, and takes place some thousand years in the future. He was also published a more or less conventional detective novel, The Uncorrupted Corpse. In his spare time, what there is of it, Greg Fowlkes plays guitar and mandolin, makes furniture, and takes his two Shiba Inus, Toshiro and Yojimbo, for long walks.