Red Planet Blues

Red Planet Blues is a science fiction novel by Robert J. Sawyer, published in 2013, and it is a noir mystery rather than a conventional space adventure. Its detective is Alex Lomax, the only private investigator working in New Klondike, the Martian frontier settlement that grew up after two prospectors found fossils on the planet.

The fossils are the reason the town exists. Back on Earth nearly any object can be synthesised, which makes the genuine remains of alien life the most valuable collectibles in existence, and the rush for them brought shiploads of treasure hunters to Mars. New Klondike is the kind of place that attracts people with nothing left to lose and gives them very little.

Lomax is one of the few residents who is there to work rather than to dig, and his cases take him through the settlement's ordinary crime and its larger deceptions. The novel expands material the author had already published as the novella Identity Theft and the story Biding Time, and it keeps the shape of a hard-boiled investigation while the setting itself is doing the science fiction. The prospectors, dealers and criminals who came for the fossils pass through his office, and the remains they are all chasing are worth killing for as well as collecting.