[Book News] Get Your Reading Fix w/ the Latest from Baen Books – December Releases

A YOUNG HERO JOURNEYS BEYOND THE EDGE OF THE KNOWN UNIVERSE IN A DESPERATE BID TO SAVE THE GALAXY FROM THE POWERS OF EVIL

ADVENTURE BEYOND THE STARS

Jayce Artan is a dock rat on a poor fringe world where he takes every job he can and prize-fights to earn enough money to get off world. When he’s hired to guide a boat crewed by an interstellar mafia, he comes face to face with an ancient power—the Veil—that was pivotal to a civil war that ended decades ago.

Jayce is “Attuned” to this power and was almost killed by agents of the dead and defeated Tyrant who nearly enslaved the galaxy. He’s rescued by an Adept of the Paragon order, warrior scholars that study the power and seek to keep any from upsetting the balance that keeps all life in order.

Jayce is given the chance to journey beyond the Veil and into another dimension where he can claim a stone of immense power and return it to base reality and wield it as a weapon against the Tyrant. The world beyond the Veil is nothing like what Jayce knows, and he’ll be opposed by insidious evil, self-doubt, and sabotage from the very people who are supposed to help him.

While beyond the Veil, Jayce learns that a Conjunction is nigh, an event that could sunder the galaxy if evil forces succeed. Jayce must claim a Veil stone deep in the other dimension before the Tyrant’s agents can beat him to the prize.

Caine Riordan and his self-styled “Crewe” have survived their first months on the planet they call Bactradgaria. They’ve overcome floods, dust storms, tornadoes, searing heat, bitter cold, desperate battles, and attacks by various strange species. However, their most desperate struggles have been against the wildly ferocious x’qao, for whom the pursuit and genocide of other beings is as much a sport as it is a strategy.

Accordingly, Caine and his friends realize that if they are to endure, they must not merely survive but thrive. So far, they’ve done just that and made friends along the way. But a few scattered tribes and towns can’t defeat the x’qao and their vassals. To do that, humans must claw higher up the food chain . . . before they tumble off into extinction.

ISHMAEL JONES NOVEL FROM NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLINGURBAN FANTASY NOVELIST SIMON R. GREEN. SUPERNATURAL DETECTIVE ISHMAEL JONES IS BACK IN THIS LATEST INSTALLMENT OF GREEN’S POPULAR SERIES.

Ishmael Jones knows all there is to know about solving mysteries. Together with his love and partner in crimes, Penny Belcourt, he specializes in cases of the weird and uncanny.

Lucas Carr went to Glenbury Hall, an old country manor house turned hotel. He signed in at reception, took his key, and went upstairs to his room. But he never got there. Somehow he vanished along the way, with not a single clue to suggest what might have happened to him.

Lucas belonged to the same mysterious organization that employs Ishmael and Penny, so they are sent in to solve the mystery. But when they arrive at grim and isolated Glenbury Hall, they discover it has a reputation as one of the most haunted old houses in England. None of the usual headless monks or walled-up nuns—just stories of lost souls that dance with the statues in the grounds; doors that won’t stay shut, and rooms that aren’t always there; and something that prowls the house in the early hours, endlessly searching. They say . . . it crawls.

Does Lucas’ disappearance have something to do with the organization or the Hall’s haunted past? Ishmael and Penny have to work their way through a series of mysterious clues and misleading suspects, uncovering secret after secret, before they finally arrive at a truth that no one suspected.

The problem with history is that it’s not always content to stay in the past.

SOMETIMES A DARK PAST CAN HAUNT YOU. OTHER TIMES, IT JUST MAY BE THE ONLY THING KEEPING YOU ALIVE.

Fresh out of college with his Ship Engineer 3rd-Class certificate, Dave Walker’s only thought is to try to find a berth on a corporate ship plying the trade routes between the many habs, orbitals, and moons in the Solar System. The problem for Dave, however, isn’t his straight C average. It’s that his stepfather, a powerful Earth Senator he’s never met, wants him dead.

Forced to take the first berth he can find, Dave ends up on the Iowa Hill, an old tramp freighter running with a minimal crew and nearing the end of its useful life, plying the routes that the corporations ignore and visiting the kinds of places that the folks on Earth pretend don’t exist.

Between the assassins, the criminals, and the pirates he needs to deal with, Dave is discovering that there are a lot of things out there that he still needs to learn.

But there’s one hard lesson he learned long ago that he’s being forced to remember: how to be ruthless.