They are the elite agents of interstellar investigation. Their mission: solve off-Earth crimes and protect humanity’s starside interests. They are the men and women of the Bureau of Special Investigations—BSI—and their cases are literally out of this world. The message was garbled, but it appeared to be a simple enough request: escort a human prisoner convicted of murder back to Earth for punishment. But when BSI agents Jamie Mendez and Hannah Wolfson arrive on a planet settled by the enigmatic Pavlat, it seems that everyone is determined to kill them before they can complete their mission—or even find out what it is. And on a planet where murder is a time-honored tradition, Death is a cause everyone believes in. Mendez and Wolfson must find a way to untangle the web of Pavlavian intrigue obscuring the case and sort out what’s really going on. But there’s far more than just one man’s life at stake—and soon they’ll have a fresh murder to solve…

They are the elite agents of interstellar investigation and their duty is to preserve and protect humanity throughout the galaxy. They are the men and women of the Bureau of Special Investigations (BSI) and their case files are literally out of this world. It was just a simple courier job, but it ended in disaster. More than six months after BSI agent Jamie Mendez’s predecessor was sent out on a mission, his ship has been found, the twenty-five-year-old agent inside dead—of old age. The urgent message he sacrificed his life to deliver has survived in the form of a highly encrypted datafile. The encryption has kept the sensitive information safe from alien code-breakers—so far. But with the decryption key lost, the file is just as useless to BSI. Now agents Mendez and Hannah Wolfson must travel off-world in the ill-fated ship on a desperate mission to discover what happened to one of their own . . . and to search for the key to a secret that could set off an interstellar, interspecies war—one that may end with humanity’s extinction.

It’s the most dangerous assignment of their careers—a mission so top-secret, not even their commanding officer has been permitted to know the details. Within minutes, BSI agents Jamie Mendez and Hannah Wolfson are whisked aboard an Elder Race ship as massive as a small moon, hurtling across the galaxy at unheard-of speed toward the scene of a crime no one dares to put into words. They’ve been partnered on the case with Brox 234—an agent of the Kendari, humanity’s chief rival in the endless game of interstellar diplomatic threat and bluster. Mendez and Wolfson quickly learn one thing for certain: they’re about to face a threat so deadly that only an alliance between the human race and its fiercest foes will give any of them even the slimmest chance of survival. And even that chance is about to slip away.…