The admin for a corporate retreat and a body-splitting alien team up to solve the murder of the company's president before their alien overlords inflict dire consequences for humanity's collective insubordination.

“The Upper Tentacle takes a delightfully bonkers premise—the subordinate of our new alien overlord must solve a murder mystery at a corporate team-building retreat—and turns it into a surprisingly sweet and eminently funny reflection on empathy, humanity, and our dire need to eat the rich. You will be consumed! And you will be honored by the consumption!” —Samantha Mills, Nebula Award-winning author of The Wings Upon Her Back

Nia would probably rather be anywhere than a closed ski resort, supporting Hugh Callahan, the president of Crestone Learning, at a company retreat. As the only admin, she is responsible for pretty much everything, from making sure that meals are on time, to preparing speeches—and also apparently solving the murder of the aforementioned and newly deceased Hugh Callahan, who was found murdered in a resort hot tub.

Meanwhile, Khearozoth, a 4th level subordinate class of shelgol'gah—the dimension-traversing, body-splitting, entity-eating alien species that has been taking over Earth, one megacorporation at a time—had one job at the retreat: to make sure that Hugh appropriately honored their master, the prodigiously hungry Greatest Supreme.

When the Greatest Supreme learns about Hugh’s death, they task Khearozoth and Nia with finding the killer. Now this unlikely pairing must work together to solve the murder—because there is a killer on the loose, and the Greatest Supreme does not brook disappointments ...