Winner of the Endeavor Award
"...one of the top science fiction sagas in recent years."
-Midwest Book Reviews
Whose rules does Detective Miles Flint live by?
Humans and aliens have formed a loose government called the Earth Alliance, with treaties that guarantee humans are subject to alien laws when on alien soil. But alien laws often seem senseless, and minor violations draw outrageous punishments-from death to the loss of a first-born child.
Miles Flint grapples with three cases that have collided: a stolen space-yacht filled with dead bodies, two kidnapped human children, and a human woman on the run to avoid alien prosecution, trying to become one of the Disappeared. Flint must enforce the law-giving the children to aliens, solving the murders, and arresting the woman for running from the legal system. But how can he enforce laws that are unjust? How can he sacrifice innocents to a system he's not sure he believes in? How can Miles Flint do the right thing in a universe where the right thing is very, very wrong?
This is Flint's first adventure in the 15-book series, the story that turns him from a police detective in the Armstrong Dome on the Moon into a Retrieval Artist.
"Part CSI, part Blade Runner, and part hard-boiled gumshoe, [Retrieval Artist] Miles Flint would be as at home on a foggy San Francisco street in the 1940s as he is in the domed lunar colony of Armstrong City."
-The Edge Boston
"Rusch has created an entertaining blend of mystery and sf, a solid police drama that asks hard questions about what justice between cultures, and even species, really is."
-Booklist
"It feels like a popular TV series crossed with a Spielberg film-engaging."
-Locus
"The Disappeared is a very readable, very thought-provoking novel that lives up to every expectation we have of Rusch and her considerable talents. Buy and enjoy."
-Analog
