Jupiter's Joke

Casey Ritter made his living running black-market cargo through the solar system. He was good at it. Too good, maybe - because when they finally caught him, the authorities offered him a deal no one else would take: fly a solo mission into the atmosphere of Jupiter itself, the most lethal environment humanity has ever touched, or spend the rest of his life in a holding cell. Ritter chose the stars. The joke, it turns out, is that no one's quite sure what he's supposed to find down there - or if anyone is supposed to come back up at all. As he plunges into the crushing depths of a gas giant, battling conditions no human body was built to endure, Ritter discovers that the real danger might not be the alien atmosphere at all. It might be the joke the universe has been playing on him all along. A propulsive mid-century adventure about a man who talks his way through the solar system and lands in a place where smooth talk means nothing - where survival comes down to something rawer, older, and far more terrifying than wit.