Books

The year is 2077. Becklyn Rose is moving to the burgeoning Unified Territories of Mars to become the director of the newly formed UTM Marshals Service. Friendly, demonstrative, an intuitive leader, but emotionally unsophisticated, Becklyn meets her new team on the long voyage there. Her new marshal, Vic McDougall, is young, educated, inexperienced, eager, multiracial, androgynous, and sensitive about it all. Hazel Templeton, her new administrative assistant, is mature, irreverent, hard-nosed, and tactless. Becklyn has seven months to bring this discordant pair together to form a cohesive team. 

Not a month into their voyage, though, the patriarch of an emigrating polygamist family is murdered, and the ship’s captain turns to Becklyn and her team for help. The investigation is hampered by a lack of expertise and equipment. Their fellow travelers are a bewildering mix of misfits, zealots, and opportunists. And the case is further complicated by a tangle of intertwining lives, historic wrongs, and shipboard infatuations. 

Still, Becklyn, Vic, and Hazel must pull together to solve the case before the captain loses precious time needed to return to Earth, before the new marshals service is tainted with failure from the start, and before the murderer strikes again on the way to Mars.