Octavia Gone

Book excerpt: From Nebula Award–winning author Jack McDevitt comes the eighth installment of the Alex Benedict series featuring Gabe triumphantly reuniting with Alex and Chase to retrieve a possible alien artifact—which may lead them to solve the greatest archaeological mystery of their careers. After being lost in space for eleven years, Gabe has returned, and is trying to find a new life for himself after being presumed dead—just as Alex and Chase are relearning how to live and work with him. But when a seemingly alien artifact goes missing from Gabe’s old collection, a mystery is uncovered concerning its origins and it grants everyone an opportunity to dive into solving it as a team, once again. When a lead on the artifact is tied to a dead pilot’s sole unrecorded trip, another clue leads to one of the greatest mysteries of the age: the infamous disappearance of a team of scientists aboard a space station orbiting a black hole—the Amelia Earhart of their time. With any luck, Alex, Chase, and Gabe may be on the trail of the greatest archaeological discovery of their careers. Nebula Award winner Jack McDevitt, who Stephen King has called “the logical heir to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke,” has created another terrific science fiction mystery in his beloved Alex Benedict series.