The Last Empress of Mars

San Jose, Costa Rica - Present Day

Nikolai “Niko” Gunn was not your run-of-the-mill private detective. In fact, he really wasn’t your run-of-the-mill anything. Born in Scotland, only child of a Scottish father and a Russian mother, he had always struggled to find a good fit, a former French Foreign Legionnaire, and a part time chef when not running his own detective agency, he was not an individual you could easily fit into any particular category. He was his own man and the world be damned. Still, like a chameleon, he could make himself adapt as needed, and he spoke nearly perfect Spanish. How he had ended up as an on-call consultant for the Homicide Division of the OIF, the Oficina de Investigación Federal, a kind of creole home-grown version of the FBI, was a mystery, even to himself, and yet, he felt extremely comfortable in this position, as if he had finally found the calling, he was always meant to have. Not that he had come to it by an easy or direct road, not by a long shot! In reality, he started very late at it and had taken many forks in the road on the way, but he was born to it. For him, every new case was a challenge that begged a timely and neat solution and in a bureaucracy like this one, especially since many considered him an outsider, a man could get extremely frustrated on the way to this kind of top notch results, but he saw this as just another obstacle and dove right in each time, full of gusto, like a kid visiting Disneyland for the first time.With a success rate close to 100%, this was his chess game, and he was the Grandmaster, the go-to-man when a particularly unusual murder took place or when a foreign national was involved and the case he had just been called in to investigate definitely fit both profiles. For someone who was supposed to be enjoying an early retirement and living a life of leisure in tropical, laid-back Pura Vida Costa Rica, this was a truly wonderful way to start off the week! As he walked into the downtown San José Las Cuatro Reinas Hotel, Niko wondered why anyone would want to kill an American tourist and his newly found lady-friend and especially in such a violent manner, as described by the preliminary report texted to him by the first beat cops on the scene, but no use getting ahead of himself, he would have plenty of time to investigate, or so he thought at the time. He had only heard the