Lost Planet Homicide Books in Order

Lost Planet Homicide is a compact science fiction noir sequence that drops a classic hardboiled homicide cop onto one of Larry Correia’s strangest settings. The lost colony world of Croatoan is a planetary death trap, and the city of Five Points survives only by clinging to the five mountain peaks high enough to rise above the corrosive acid clouds.

Generations after the colonists crash-landed, Five Points is a maze of stacked domes, cavern slums, and corporate enclaves. Powerful companies rule the surface levels. Criminal syndicates carve up the tunnels below. Government officials are either bought, broken, or both. Murder is part of the cost of doing business, but every now and then a death is messy enough that someone has to pretend to care.

That someone is Detective Chief Inspector Lutero Cade, one of the few honest cops left in Homicide. In the first story, Lost Planet Homicide, he catches a case involving a Special Magistrate found dissolving in a protein vat. Following the evidence drags him through every layer of the city, from ritzy corporate towers to maintenance shafts no one sane visits on purpose.

Ghosts of Zenith raises the stakes by putting blood on holy ground. The Landing Site, the battered husk of the original habitat module that saved the first settlers, has become a symbol of survival. When someone sheds blood there, the colony takes it as a personal insult. Cade has to solve the crime while balancing civic outrage, corporate posturing, and a creeping suspicion that the city itself is starting to come apart at the seams.

The Five Points Ripper pushes the series fully into serial-killer territory. Bodies turn up that do not quite look like ordinary murders, rumors fly about something inhuman hunting the streets, and Cade has to work out how much of that is panic and how much is true. At every step, he’s fighting not just the killer but the apathy of institutions more interested in profit than justice.

Lost Planet Homicide stories are short enough to read in an evening but dense with atmosphere. They combine the rhythms of classic detective fiction - interviews, clues, and stakeouts - with corrosive rainstorms, malfunctioning life-support systems, and the knowledge that there is literally nowhere else to go. If you like your SF grounded in grime, graft, and one stubborn cop who will not look away, this series is a good fit.