J. Daniel Sawyer

High in the desert, between the mountains out west, up where the ground throbs from the nuclear test detonations, the casinos still glitter, drawing people from the far reaches of the world. They come here to try their luck, to take a chance, to have the adventures they wouldn't write home about. In this other-world, the desert offers one last hope for the penniless, the luckless, the loveless, and the hopeless. A pawnshop dealing in wonders, where everything is for sale: a chance to get off the street, a few extra days with a dying lover, an afternoon in the sun, a home to call your own, the perfect wedding, the chance to become a master magician, or a giraffe for your Sunday morning. But beware of the Master, and price he demands. In the tradition of The Twilight Zone and The Illustrated Man, master storyteller J. Daniel Sawyer guides through phantasms of hilarity, perversity, horror, and heartbreak in the darkest corners of the human soul.

Hadrian Jin. Skyguard. Refugee. Twelve times a day, this sixteen-year-old proprietor of Luna City's best orn-suit shop fits the wings, and jumps out into the open air to soar with the grace of an eagle. For forty dollars an hour, he can teach any groundhog how to fly bird-fashion in the moon's low gravity. But when the tramp of military boots on the road to his home forces him to flee, he finds himself adrift between planets, on the run from government agents, without hope of home. Out of his depth and thrust into danger for which he's ill-prepared, Hadrian must learn the true reason for his exile, and finally spread his own wings...

When ten-year-old Teddy Stride wanted to impress the professional snoop down the street, he opened his own detective agency. But when Teddy's father goes off the rails, and his precocious investigative prowess fails him, he turns to the only firm he knows who might be able to find out what's wrong before it's too late: Clarke Lantham Investigations.Clarke Lantham hates family squabbles, but something about Teddy makes it impossible to say no. Lantham had no way to know that taking the case would send him straight to the heart of the biggest academic scandal in state history, and set him on a collision course with ghosts from his past that could jeopardize his freedom, ruin his career, and endanger the life of everyone he loves.

She has everything to die for.Death begins at home...The Milky Way. Sixty thousand light years across. A hundred billion planets to explore. Most of them out of reach, even of the Mannix-Alcubierre Warp Drive. In 2235, Earth's few well-worn neighbors brim with colonists and terraformers. Humanity now faces the final limits of its growth.When Chan Xiyi Aya's dream of life beyond the rim lands her in hot water with the Foundation who employs her, she gets her shot at the job she's aching for: chronicling the history of a planet she'd kill to protect, three hundred light years beyond the rim of human space. The catch?Only the dead can go."..a gut-twisting adventure I couldn't put down." -Nathan Lowell, author of In Darkness Forged