Matters Arising from the Identification of the Body: a Guerline Scarfe investigation

Tanja Morgenstein, daughter of a wealthy industrialist and a geochemist, is dead from exposure to Titan's lethal, chilled atmosphere, and Guerline Scarfe must determine why.

This novella blends hard-SF extrapolation with elements of contemporary crime fiction, to envisage a future human society in a hostile environment, in which a young woman's worst enemies may be those around her.

Matters Arising from the Identification of the Body won the 2018 Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Novella or Novelette, and was shortlisted in the analogous category in both the Aurealis and Ditmar Awards.

"I haven't enjoyed something from this subgenre so much since Caves of Steel - this is a story Asimov might have written if he'd been obsessed with Titan and Nordic crime instead of robots, if he'd actually been the secular humanist he aspired to be, and if he'd had access to all the fascinating modern research into the solar system."

--Thoraiya Dyer, author of the Titan's Forest series

"I thoroughly enjoyed this novella. Petrie's writing just gets better and better all the time. The main character, Guerline Scarfe, was very well drawn and engaging."

--Dawn Meredith, author of Letters from the Dead

"I highly recommend Matters Arising From the Identification of the Body to fans of science fiction and mystery/crime stories. It is both a procedural and science fiction, but I expect it will appeal more to fans of the latter genre than the former."

--Tsana Dolichva, astrophysicist and co-editor of Defying Doomsday