Donald E. Westlake 44 min read

Henderson is jovial but stern, which means he's happy with Ged's last job and sure the next one hides crooked shenanigans; and Ged, a plain-living roving claim investigator, hates complications.

Donald E. Westlake's 1961 story is a sharp social-SF space opera mystery. Clever, engaging golden-age SF. Read it for a genial insurance-investigator yarn from the future master of crime fiction, where a routine claim on a hostile world turns out to hide a clever and deadly fraud.

In its time

Published in 1961, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

44 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Larry Ivie