Empty Between the Stars
The stars are not empty — they are waiting. A deep-space adventure of discovery, danger and the fragile hope of those who cross the dark.
About this book
A world of eternal night. A murder without a clue. A detective with a millennium of secrets. Book One of the Songs of Old Sol — far-future noir on a fungal backwater moon where the sun never rises.
Hexator is the galaxy's “Twelfth World” — a backwater moon of fungal forests, boiling monsoons and the legendary spore-spice trade, where civilisation has crawled back into the mud. William Roxley, known to some as “Sweet William”, arrives looking like a simple trader. He is nothing of the kind: a citizen of the Humanitum Core, an ex-magistrate with an augmented m-brain and a past spanning centuries and a dozen occupations — priest, surgeon, soldier. He hasn't come for the spice. He's come for the truth.
The head of the noble House of Blez has been assassinated, and on a moon ruled by four feuding crime syndicates, everyone is a suspect. Roxley is caught between Lady Alice Blez — a genetically-engineered widow far more dangerous than her grief suggests — a desperate peasant rebellion called the Moths, and the Wurms, an alien species that leeches off the minds of their own crippled AI gods.
Accompanied by Mozart, a sarcastic dented robot bodyguard with enough hidden firepower to level a city, and Simenon, a local orphan with a hidden heritage, Roxley must solve the murder before the moon ignites in revolution — and confront the realisation that, out in the Empty between the stars, some miracles are worse than deaths.
The doorway into the Songs of Old Sol universe — a far-future detective story that opens an epic, with the atmosphere of a Tudor town grown among giant mushrooms and a mystery that reaches all the way to the gods.
- you like Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon and the grit of The Expanse;
- you want Sherlock-Holmes deduction in a far-future setting;
- you love high-concept world-building and a sharp robot sidekick.