In the Orbit of Saturn

The year is 1930s space. A police officer boards a pirate ship disguised as a wealthy passenger, intending to bring down the Solar Scourge, a legendary corsair whose name alone makes spacers shudder. What he finds is worse than piracy: a brutal captain dreaming of building a new world from the ashes of the old, and prisoners rotting in chains while the crew fractures into factions. When the mutiny comes, Quirl Finner must choose between his mission and the lives he's come to care about, between the law he serves and the strange honor he finds among outlaws. This is pulp science fiction at its most alive. Starzl writes with the kinetic energy of someone who believed the future would be as violent and strange as the present. The action crackles, the moral universe is gray rather than black and white, and the ending doesn't tie everything in a bow. It lingers. For readers who want their space opera with teeth, who prefer their outlaws complicated and their revolutions bloody.