Adam-Troy Castro's fiction has won the Seiun and Philip K. Dick Awards, and received two nominations for the Hugo, three for the Stoker, and eight for the Nebula.

Andrea Cort 3 - War of the Marionettes by Adam-Troy Castro

Vlhan. Where a race of incredibly intelligent, and sometimes unpredictably dangerous, aliens yearly perform a dance where tens of thousands of their kind die, all in pursuit of a mysterious purpose vital not only to their own survival but also to that of the human race. But something has gone wrong...

Andrea Cort. Genius. Misanthrope. War Criminal. Solver of Crimes. She has traveled to Vlhan with her lovers, the linked pair known as the Porrinyards. Now, against the backdrop of a sudden and bloody war, she must not only find a missing girl, not only prevent a catastrophe that might spell the end of the human race...but also make a decision that will change her own future beyond imagining.

Previous stories about the Vlhani have been nominated for two Nebulas and one Hugo. The Andrea Cort stories have been also been Nebula-nominated, and the first novel, Emissaries From The Dead, won the Philip K. Dick Award. Now Andrea Cort arrives on Vlhan for the confrontation that will change everything!

 

REVIEWS

  • "[The Andrea Cort] series really is something special… These books are compulsively readable space mysteries, but they're also hiding little packets of cleverness and substance under the surface. Highly recommended."

    – io9

  • "…Fully successful as both science fiction and murder mystery."

    – SciFi Weekly

  • "A uniquely absorbing read. It envelops you in a truly exotic and alien environment, and gives you a heroine to root for."

    – SF Reviews
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

Prologue

We were prisoners. It had been hours, maybe days, since we had felt the heat of the Vlhani sun, an eternity spent in a cramped, pitch-black chamber with little food or water, listening to the scraping noises the whips of our captors made as they punched through subterranean rock.

It was difficult to avoid being sickened by the stench of the blood that had long since dried on our clothes. Some of it was my own, spilled from a nasty crack to the skull; others belonged to the people I'd seen ripped apart on a terrible killing ground.

The killing had spread across this globe like an epidemic of murder, claiming fanatics and innocents; true believers and cynics: human beings and aliens; people who had come to this world searching for meaning and people who had come here trying to understand a phenomenon. I suspected that it went on still.

Peace has always been a fragile thing. It can end at any time. But death, bloodshed, madness…they have momentum all their own.

Start the fire, and it continues to burn.