Seeker

Nine thousand years ago, two ships carried a group of dissidents away from a tyrannical Earth to found a colony called Margolia. Nothing was ever heard from them again, and the story has settled into the comfortable status of legend. Then a cup turns up in the possession of a woman who has no idea what she has, bearing markings that identify it as belonging to the Seeker, one of those two ships. Alex Benedict, antiquities dealer and unapologetic commercial operator, understands immediately what the discovery is worth, and he and his pilot Chase Kolpath begin working backwards from a single artefact through a chain of previous owners, forged provenances and reluctant witnesses. People who have handled the trail before them have a habit of dying. What they eventually find is not the romantic ruin the legend promises, and the answer to what happened to Margolia is grimmer and stranger than any of the historians hoping to fund an expedition would like. McDevitt writes his far future as a comfortable, litigious, thoroughly commercial place, and the pleasure of the book is procedural: a cold case worked patiently across light years, with archaeology standing in for detection.