About the Book
Robert J. Sawyer, the author of such “revelatory and thought-provoking” novels as Triggers and The WWW Trilogy, presents a noir mystery expanded from his Hugo and
Nebula Award-nominated novella “Identity Theft” and his Aurora
Award-winning short story “Biding Time,” and set on a lawless Mars in a
future where everything is cheap, and life is even cheaper…
Alex Lomax is the one and only private eye working the mean streets of New
Klondike, the Martian frontier town that sprang up forty years ago after Simon Weingarten and Denny O’Reilly discovered fossils on the Red
Planet. Back on Earth, where anything can be synthesized, the remains of alien life are the most valuable of all collectibles, so shiploads of
desperate treasure hunters stampeded to Mars in the Great Martian Fossil Rush.
Trying to make an honest buck in a dishonest world, Lomax tracks down killers and kidnappers among the failed prospectors,
corrupt cops, and a growing population of transfers — lucky stiffs
who, after striking paleontological gold, upload their minds into
immortal android bodies. But when he uncovers clues to solving the
decades-old murders of Weingarten and O’Reilly, along with a journal
that may lead to their legendary mother lode of Martian fossils, God
only knows what he’ll dig up...
