Lion Loose

The Seventh Star Hotel is dying. Guest reservations have dried up, the decor is fading, and the management is desperate. When the luxury liner Camelot announces it will dock, hope springs: this could save the failing space station. But something else has boarded with the passengers. The Hlat is loose. Quillan arrives with secrets written in scars and a past he'd rather forget. Reetal Destone trades in information, her expertise is industrial espionage, and she knows how to find the cracks in any operation. Together, they're the only ones who might see the shape of what's really happening aboard the Seventh Star: a criminal conspiracy called the Brotherhood of Beldon, and a creature so dangerous that even the most hardened spacer would rather face a laser than meet its eyes. As Schmitz writes, the most dangerous animal isn't the biggest or fiercest, it's the one that's hardest to stop. Add intelligence to that, and you have a menace that defies every assumption. This is tight, tense space noir with a predator at its heart and two complicated people trying to stay alive long enough to unravel a conspiracy. It moves fast, it hits hard, and the creature at its center lingers in your imagination long after the final page.