They thought the planet was tidally locked to its sun, so they built mines on the dark side, and Nightside City to provide entertainment to the miners and part them from their hard earned pay. About a hundred years later, they realized it wasn't a tidal lock but rather an incredibly slow planetary rotation and suddenly the doomed Nightside City, with its showy casinos, became a popular tourist attraction. The lucky few got off-planet before the casinos realized their workforce was fleeing and they ensured only the wealthy escaped. P.I. Carlisle Hsing had hoped working for some of the larger casinos would be her ticket off-planet, but a rival framed her for some illegal hacking and she got blacklisted. Now she's stuck living and working in the part of town between the vibrant downtown and the abandoned sky scrapers up slope in the sun without the money to move further into the shade and forget about passage off-planet.

In the first novella, Nightside City, Hsing is approached by some of the homeless who've been squatting on the lower floors of the abandoned buildings. They've pooled all their cash hoping she can stop them from being evicted by thugs sent by the mysterious "new owners" of those buildings. She's pretty sure they aren't lying but the idea of anyone buying those buildings is ridiculous given that they're slowly getting hotter. Her investigation will lead her to the scientists studying this extreme case of global warming, underground cryo chambers where you can dream away the end of the world, and ruthless owners of the casinos. Untangling this wild case of fraud would be a lot easier if her potential witnesses would quit dying before she reached them.

Realms of Light: Following her last case Hsing is now living on the only other habitable planet in Nightside's system, but she hasn't forgotten her only brother is still stuck there working in a casino. She also hasn't forgotten her father in his drug induced cryo dreams but refuses to care about him. Her wealthy patron wants her to investigate a murder and won't accept her refusal. The victim? Her patron. Time of the crime? Now. Only one other person knows about the job so she could let the police attempt to figure out which member of the family decided their patriarch was taking too long to die but he dangled the one reward she can't refuse, the ability to get her brother out of Nightside City. Conveniently, he leant her his private yacht and it's Captain, the only one he trusted. All they have to do is land at Nightside City, access the guy's secret data archive, grab her brother, and get out before anyone there realizes the man is dead. Then again, is he actually dead or is this all a ploy to reveal the traitors in his own household by sending Hsing out as bait?

These short gritty noir style detective stories are a good blend of realism and the bizarre. Could corporations really be greedy enough to settle people on a planet without thoroughly investigating the solar system. If we didn't believe that half of the sci-fi novels written wouldn't make any sense. Prevent said population of leaving while they are making bank on tourism to a doomed settlement? Again, the answer is obviously yes. Hsing may be down on her luck but she still has the skills, mostly as a hacker, to find the culprits and then use that information to maximum advantage for herself and her family. Despite being novella's there is also a fairly deep backstory on the estrangement between Hsing, her father, and her brother even if it's not the most original story ever. The novellas are available in paperback as well as ebook format but not audio. Some of Watt-Evans' books are finally showing up in audio but its a fairly big backlog so I wouldn't expect these too soon.