She's the most notorious bounty hunter in the Federation. Her predation of pirates, criminals, and New Hollywood executives have made her the nightmare bogeyman of any who dare to target the weak and helpless. The Overone of the Fey fears her as the harbinger of mass resistance against its telepathic domination of enslaved species.

She shoots first, and rarely asks questions. She eats a kilogram of meat in a single sitting, and likes her tools oversized, overpowered, and crammed into tight packages. But none of that will help her this time. This time the job isn't about tracking down a desperate fugitive, or playing hunter and prey with an entire crews of gun toting pirate. This time the job is a criminal investigation.

The case: the murder of an alien ambassador, found cut, sliced, and minced by the bipedal vertebrates seeking permanent residency on the land masses of his homeworld. The stakes: the future of an entire colony, and the forced evacuation of three generations of residents in accordance with Federation laws against imperialism.

The bounty hunter: an amazonian introvert with a panoply of social anxieties and self-doubts, a sick certainty that the locale gendarmes would rather arrest her than solve the case, and an archive of ancient detective stories for inspiration. It's a bad joke, and Lisa's about to get acquainted with an entire species of aquatic comedians.