Escape is the only mythology that matters in this bruising 1950s odyssey. Barstac, a man whose name is legend and whose hands are blood, breaks out of a Martian penitentiary with nothing but a convict's hunger for the one place that might offer absolution: Deimos, the moon that drifts at the edge of human reach. He's accompanied by Marian Sayers, a wealthy woman drawn to his infamy like a moth to flame. But escape, Barstac learns, is a moving target. The red plains of Mars are hunting ground, and the pursuit is as psychological as it is physical. When Marian's true motives surface reveal a vengeance rooted in her husband's death at Barstac's hands the journey becomes something darker: a reckoning with the self. The Martians of Deimos, strange healers with therapeutic powers, may offer redemption or another kind of trap. Walton's novel is existential noir wrapped in planetary adventure, a story about men who run not toward something but away from everything they cannot forgive themselves for.
