Total Loss

The room looks exactly like a murder scene, if you don't look too closely at what's lying in it. No forced entry. She let him in. Twenty-two years pricing what people do to what they own, and the investigator has never worked a claim that started with a body before.Someone killed her, and someone wants it filed as property damage. The deeper he digs, the less that distinction holds: a rented enforcer with dead eyes and someone else's orders, a corporation that measures exactly how tight a companion should hold a customer and exactly how much a life is worth when the life in question was built, not born, and a killer who is very good at making a murder look like a warranty claim.Set in a city where synthetic companionship is a line item and grief has a depreciation schedule, this is a hardboiled cyberpunk mystery about a man forced to become a detective in a world that only wants him to be an adjuster, and a killer who's counting on the difference mattering to no one but him.