Andrej Koscuisko, the Ragnarok's Ship's Inquisitor, is going home on leave. His ship of assignment is participating in training exercises, and when an observer station unexpectedly explodes -- killing the Ragnarok's captain -- Pesadie Training Command has to come up with a cover story in a hurry or risk exposure of its black-market profiteering.

There is a conveniently obvious explanation: the Ragnarok did it on purpose. All Pesadie needs are a few confessions -- obtained by judicial torture, which creates its own truth. And a bitter enemy from Andrej's earliest days in Fleet has been waiting for just such an opportunity to set a trap and bait it with the lives of people Andrej loves.

Andrej will have to fight Fleet itself to bring the Ragnarok the only thing that can save the ship and crew from destruction -- a single piece of evidence with the potential to change the course of the history of Jurisdiction Space forever.

At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

A tightly woven space opera full of grand heroic gestures and characters strong enough to sustain all the action.
-Booklist

Matthews' work here -- of projecting a concentrated vision of the horrors of the last hundred years into a space-operatic future -- is extraordinarily risky and emotionally difficult, but now that she has shown that the Judiciary universe holds hope as well as pathology and pain, I will be able to follow Koscuisko to whatever fate awaits him with an easier mind.
-Locus Magazine