The Affair of the Ghost Freighter (Inspector Matthias Veyron Stories)($9.99Value)

Description

The Starlace Meridian , a registered cargo freighter of the Rigel Drift Corridor, is found drifting and silent by a bureau patrol vessel on a Tuesday morning. Her running beacons are functioning. Her cargo hold is full. Her bridge is empty. Her communications have been manually suppressed. And in her cargo inspection chamber, Julian Rourke — a licensed freight broker — is dead. The sole survivor, a young navigation officer named Elian Drax, has a story: pirates, six of them, in environment suits, boarding without warning. They killed Rourke and forced Drax into an escape pod. Then they left. They left without taking the cargo. Inspector Matthias Veyron of the Interstellar Police Bureau boards the Meridian and notes, within his first hour, that the hold is entirely intact. His first recorded remark on the case: Pirates rarely leave the treasure behind. What follows is a patient, precise investigation into a scheme of considerable ingenuity — involving misrepresented mineral cargo, an inflated insurance policy, a cooperative freight guild, a blinded navigation beacon, and a crew that abandoned ship in an orderly sequence two minutes apart. The scheme had been months in the planning. It had required professional expertise, institutional knowledge, and a careful assembly of people each contributing a specific capability. It had not required anyone to die. That part was unplanned. The Affair of the Ghost Freighter is the fourth novel in the Inspector Matthias Veyron series — self-contained investigations in a mature colonial system where commerce, institutions, and human nature combine in ways that are rarely dramatic but frequently illuminating. Veyron does not race. He does not perform. He absorbs, he questions, and he waits for the simplest true explanation to emerge from beneath the complicated apparent one. It always does. Suitable for readers of classic detective fiction, procedural mysteries, and character-driven speculative fiction. The series is written in UK English and observes the narrative conventions of the golden age detective tradition.