Greg Fowlkes Knihy

The Rathcael Codex has gone missing and private investigator James Tolliver has been hired to find it. The manuscript, written sometime in the eleventh century by a mad Irish monk, had disappeared for centuries until it had surfaced in an invitation only auction in Vienna. But, on the way to its new owner, Timeus Brockington, a San Francisco millionaire, it has been stolen, leaving the intermediary, an elderly dealer in rare books, dead. Tolliver must search 1930s San Francisco while dodging criminals, cults, and a secret agent of the Vatican to find who has the Rathcael Codex.

Pleasant Prairie is much like hundreds of other towns that lie between the Mississippi and the Rockies. There is a railroad running through it, and standing tall and proud next to the tracks there is a set of grain elevators. There is a bank, a church, the county courthouse, and a main street which in practical Midwestern fashion is named Main Street. As with most small towns, the residents are born and die, get married and beget children, all within the confines of Pleasant Prairie. But outside of harvest time when the railroad and the grain elevators bustle with activity, nothing much ever happens in Pleasant Prairie. Nothing much, that is, until the day the carnival came to town.

In celestial mechanics, there is no exact solution to the class of problems of calculating the orbits of three bodies circling each other. Frank Sladek, a private investigator on Star City, a hollowed out asteroid orbiting a brown dwarf, has a different kind of problem to solve. With three bodies on his hands, he has to find a solution to dealing with the aftermath in a way that will get him off the hook and won’t get him killed. Whether it’s a body with four arms, a body that won’t stay dead, or the body of a murdered friend who has left him a package, his task won’t be easy, but whether by his wits or good aim with a laser pistol, Sladek must find a solution to survive.

Constable Elena Ortiz was on her way home after a two-day patrol when she spotted a vehicle pulled over on the side of the road. When she stops to investigate, she discovers the body of a man lying in the dust, the faceplate of his surface suit open, an apparent suicide. As it is late, she leaves the scene, but when she returns the next morning, both the vehicle and the body are gone.Her boss, Chief Inspector McKernan, has his own problem; something is causing people to forget they are on Mars with potentially lethal consequences. Are the two related, and what happened to the body in the dust?