Mars was supposed to be paradise, and for a while, it was — until its first murder. The investigator sent to solve it finds the father who left him before he was even born — and a secret this paradise was built to hide.

SYNOPSIS:

Forty years after humanity fled a dying Earth to build a utopia on Mars, EUGENE, an investigator, is sent from Earth to solve the colony's first murder — while secretly hunting both the truth behind the colony's miracle energy source and the father who abandoned him for this world. Beneath its flawless surface, Eugene discovers a paradise sustained by an engineered underclass stripped of pain, fear, and will — and at the center of it, the father he never knew: the founder who built both this world and its darkest sin. As his colleagues are silenced and the colony's serene leader defends its cruelty as mercy, Eugene realizes that humanity has rebuilt, light-years from home, the very evils it fled. Mortally wounded, he chooses to expose the truth at the cost of everything — sending the evidence, and a pregnant survivor, back to Earth, and bringing the system down with himself. A Mars-set sci-fi noir about how far humanity will run from itself, and the single sacrifice that plants a seed of change.