Cocaine is for pansies. On his first day at the Controlled Substances Agency, Mack Darvey gets to witness a drug that makes your skin boil. Literally. Fifteen years of experience in Narcotics on Earth is out the window... in this new world of interplanetary law enforcement, the rules are almost as dangerous as the criminals — and the criminals are scary as hell.
But with a major deal going down in his own backyard, Darvey has to put aside his prejudices (and his scotch) and come to grips with rail guns, jump drives, psyche amplifiers and ascendant beings... or he's going to end up a mess of un-mourned pulp on a backwater planet his friends back home don't know exists.
Darvey was the master of his old reality, but that's gone. This is galactic narcotics control. This is the new "real."
