RED DUST

Red Dust

Mars, 2132. A body in the water supply. A colony that can't afford the truth.

When Detective Mara Solano is called to Water Reclamation Plant One at 4:47 in the morning, Colony Security is already calling it an accident. They're wrong — and she knows it the moment she sees the bruises.

Dr. Adira Patel was a senior engineer. A thirteen-year Mars veteran who helped design the very facility where she was found dead. Someone disabled the safety sensors. Someone scrubbed her access log. Someone wanted her buried quietly, along with whatever she'd discovered.

Paired with Kael Orin — her new partner, Dustborn, brilliant, and carrying his own understanding of what it means to call Mars home — Mara begins to pull at a thread that leads deep into the infrastructure of Ares City itself. The water that keeps fifty-two thousand people alive. The corporations that built the colony. The powerful figures who have spent years ensuring that certain questions are never asked.

Dr. Patel had asked them anyway.

Red Dust is a richly atmospheric science fiction crime novel — part police procedural, part conspiracy thriller, part deeply human story about justice, whistleblowing, and what people owe each other when they choose to build a life somewhere no one was ever supposed to survive. It asks what accountability looks like when the city around you depends on the very systems being corrupted, and whether one detective, one partner, and the careful work of one dead woman are enough to answer that question.

Perfect for fans of The Expanse, Ann Leckie, and the grounded, character-driven end of science fiction — or anyone who loves a crime story with real stakes and a world they won't want to leave.

"The truth does not care how far from home you are."