Jordan McKell is a freelance smuggler, taking jobs in dingy spaceport bars when he's offered a contract to take a strange ship with a seal cargo of alien artifacts to Earth. When one of the crew is murdered by a saboteur, and alerts are put out for him and the ship, McKell realizes that he's stumbled into something big. The cargo of the Icarus could upend an interstellar transport monopoly, and a lot of people want to make sure that they get the benefit. It's up to McKell to figure out who to trust in his crew of strangers, along with his partner, an alien Ixil who's a composite being.

Zahn blends gritty smuggler space opera a la Firefly or Han Solo with an Agatha Christie parlor murder. It's okay, though nothing to write home about. The setting seems cobbled together out of scifi tropes, rather than a cohesive vision of anything. And as a mystery, the alien tech allows for deus ex machina explanation of what happens, rather than a careful piecing together of clues. Finally, there's the twist. McKell isn't actually a smuggler, he's a deep undercover cop trying to bust a galactic crime lord. This makes some of his personality traits make more sense, but I'm not sure I like a bait and switch that big.