Two weeks from retirement, Martian homicide detective Rex Caulder catches one last body in an alley — a dead man whose veins glow with something that isn't a drug. It's Whisper: a nanotech compound engineered not to get people high, but to switch off the human capacity to want. And the trail leads straight to Caulder's missing daughter. To reach her before she's erased for good, one burned-out cop has to tear through his own department, a corporate empire, and fifty years of a plan to retire human desire itself — starting with hers.