Stated first printing, dated. Paperback original per ISFDB. Tight, flat, square book. Spine creased and cupped. Edge wear and rubbed tip. Marginal toning. Satcon Station was once the Queen of the Skies, a destination. Now she's an aging hulk, an orbiting Chinatown, a station on the way to elsewhere. But strange things can happen on Satcon Station that require an investigator to poke his nose into dark corners. Despite the best efforts of UN red tape to impede space enterprise, a century of development has seen the building of space facilities spanning Earth orbit to the Asteroid Belt. Once the US Space Command enforced the rules. Now that is the domain of Fleet Agents like Bockhorn, working for space concerns like MexAmerican Pacific. Most of Bockhorn?s work is dealing with stowaways and truants skipping out on their contracts1. This case is different. MA P has told Bockhorn to report to statuesque T.J. Janes (odd, as she?s not an MA P employee). The case: reporter Lauren Potter has vanished. Janes believes that something untoward has happened to Potter. Bockhorn isn?t clear why she believes that. The attractive reporter could have simply moved on to another station without reporting back to her superiors. But MA P orders are MA P orders, so Bockhorn commences a dogged search for Potter. Some consulting detectives rely on keen insight and brilliant deduction. Bockhorn isn?t brilliant but he is persistent. He starts flipping over every metaphorical rock on Satcon to see what jumps out at him. It?s the sort of approach that leaves a Fleet Agent the target of violent men anxious to convince Bockhorn to go home. Some detectives deal with that sort of thing by being nigh-indestructible. Bockhorn relies on having more extremities than the other side has time to break. An increasingly battered Bockhorn discovers he finds himself in a hotbed of shady deals, mooks, goons, gunsels, seductive molls, muscular space-lesbians, depraved bisexuals, corpses, misguided infatuations, and flagrant Maltese Falcon homages, all presented in Male-Gaze-o-Vision. But what does it all add up to? And can he stay alive long enough to put it all together?