Perihelion: A Sci-Fi Murder Mystery (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798257630538)

Detective Stephen Cross didn't want to go to space. He likes San Francisco. He likes Earth. He likes the ability to walk outside on his lunch break.

He goes anyway - because a man is dead on Waypoint Station, three hundred miles above the city, and Cross has spent twenty-two years never turning down a case. He isn't about to start now.

The dead man's name is Mike Okafor. Everyone on the station says he was a great guy. The blood on his quarters' wall tells a different story. So does the Tamagotchi still running on his desk, the baseball cards in their protective sleeves, the vinyl record with no player in sight - the accumulated evidence of a man who spent six years above the Earth and never stopped looking back at it.

The more Cross digs, the more complicated Mike becomes: petty and difficult, funny and homesick, trying in the way that flawed people try, right up until the moment someone decided he was a problem worth solving. And the more Cross investigates, the more certain he becomes that he wasn't sent up here to solve anything.

He was sent to be the lid on the pot.

Perihelion is a murder mystery set in an unglamorous, lived-in future - part noir detective novel, part conspiracy thriller, and entirely about what it costs to do the right thing when the institution you work for has decided you shouldn't.