Coffin for Jacob

Ben Carson has just graduated as a junior astrogator, but his first act in the vacuum is murder. One punch, delivered in a fit of irritation on Luna City, kills a drunk stranger instantly. The face follows him. It breathes with him. It whispers while atomic engines rumble beneath his feet. Fleeing to Venus seems like escape, but the red jungles and alien horizons cannot drown out the murmuring dead. Desperate for refuge, Ben bargains with an underground movement: he'll serve their cause in exchange for their silence about his crime. Yet his tortured conscience won't allow him to commit. He's a ghost haunting his own mission, present but not belonging, fighting for a cause he cannot embrace while the dead man's face watches from every shadow. What makes this book endure is its uncomfortable truth: you cannot outrun yourself. The vastness of space, the strangeness of alien worlds, the drama of revolutionary struggle, all of it shrinks before the inescapable presence of guilt. For anyone who has ever tried to escape the unescapable.