The Market Murder

By: Greg Ratajik

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

When a vacation becomes a locked-room murder investigation, famous detective Maya Chen must solve an impossible crime while trapped with the killer.

Private investigator Maya Chen thought she was taking a well-deserved vacation in Seattle. After solving the infamous Blackwood Island murders and unraveling the Chicago Ghost Passenger case, she just wanted to be a tourist—visit Pike Place Market, sip coffee, enjoy the rain.

But when police sirens interrupt her dinner at an exclusive sushi restaurant, Maya's investigative instincts prove impossible to ignore.

At the nearby Inn at the Market, Microsoft AI researcher Dr. Nathan Cross has been found dead in his locked hotel room—killed by his own coffee maker in what appears to be an impossible murder. The door was locked from inside. There are no other exits. The security footage shows no one entering or leaving. Yet someone modified his expensive siphon coffee maker to deliver a lethal dose of poison at exactly the right moment.

When Detective Marcus Tanaka recognizes Maya and asks for her help, she finds herself trapped in the hotel as it goes into lockdown. Now she must investigate while confined with eight suspects—one of whom is definitely the killer:

• An ambitious Microsoft colleague passed over for promotion

• A desperate journalist with mounting debts

• A dying professor whose research was stolen

• A venture capitalist with consortium connections

• A hotel night manager with a tragic past

• A bitter maintenance chief who lost everything to AI

• A coffee equipment expert who happens to be the detective's sister

• A calculating lawyer with hidden depths

As Maya interviews each suspect, she discovers that Dr. Cross was about to expose a massive conspiracy involving his revolutionary AI detection technology—software that could identify any deepfake or synthetic identity. Someone offered him $50 million to suppress his research. He was planning to take the money and publish his findings anyway.

Now Maya must use all her deductive skills to solve a classic locked-room mystery while dealing with a new challenge: her own fame. Everyone knows who she is. Some try to use her celebrity status for their own gain. Others retreat behind walls of lawyers and lies. And somewhere among them, a killer watches her every move, planning their next step.

In the tradition of Agatha Christie's finest mysteries, THE MARKET MURDER delivers a fair-play puzzle where all the clues are available to the reader. Set against the atmospheric backdrop of rain-soaked Seattle, this third Maya Chen mystery explores themes of truth, technology, and the price of knowledge in our modern world.

Can Maya solve the impossible murder before the lockdown ends and the killer escapes? Or will her fame finally prove to be the weakness that defeats her?