The Body in the Hydroponics Bay
Four hundred years into a thousand-year voyage, everybody on Halcyon's Rest knows everybody else's business - which is exactly why nobody expects Otis Renner, the ship's quietest archivist and its most punctual customer, to turn up dead among the bean trellises with his coat buttoned wrong.
The Council calls it equipment failure. Mabel Osei, who has run the Steeped Kettle tea stall for forty-one years and remembers every secret her customers ever confessed over a hot cup, calls it nonsense.
Otis was her friend. He sat at her counter the morning he died with a strange question about the ship's most sacred recording - and never got to finish asking it. Now Mabel intends to finish it for him, one pot of tea at a time, and what she uncovers behind the Council's careful smiles is bigger than one murder: a hundred-and-thirty-eight-year-old secret that three founding families agreed, generations ago, never to tell.
With a worried grandson, a reclusive engineer who hasn't set foot on Commons deck in six years, and a baker who makes a surprisingly good alibi witness, Mabel has until Founding Day - the one day a year the whole ship gathers to celebrate a history that may not be true - to prove that the tidiest-looking killer in the world is only tidy from the outside.
Some secrets keep for four hundred years. This one only had eleven days left.
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