Patrick Swenson Books

A man is found murdered and brutally impaled near the Seattle waterfront, and during the investigation, private detectives Dave Crowell and Alan Brindos come face to face with an alien drug known as RuBy. It's a dangerous prototype that's bound to cause problems for the eight worlds of the Union. The murder case itself would be easy enough to solve-that is, if the suspects weren't already dead, and the Seattle Authority cop sharing the case wasn't Crowell's disgruntled ex-partner. A prequel to The Ultra Thin Man, "Slightly Ruby" features Crowell and Brindos before their Network Intelligence Organization contract, scraping out a living in a city-and on a world-the Union is quickly forgetting.

There's magic in the forest and it sings . . . Truman Starkey heard it once, there in the ancient rain forest. A song that could raise the dead, a song that could bend time to its will. A song that might finally solve the puzzle of what Truman has lost-his ability to compose music. But every magic needs fuel, and this magic, this song, demands a soul, a heart, or the most dangerous drug ever invented: Moss. Kat Gregory is a bar singer who hopes there's no such thing as destiny, because if she can't change hers, someone's going to die. She knows. It's happened before. Kat must risk her mind and soul on Moss, and on a man she's never met. Joel Hines knows he can thwart his destiny if he can just bring his mother back from the dead. To do it, he needs more of the Moss that has warped him into a mage of terrifying power. That means hunting down Kat. He'll torture and kill anyone who gets in his way. What Truman doesn't know is that the mysterious song in the rain found him for a reason. His true destiny is to compose the music that will defeat the mage. If only Kat can find him. If only Hines doesn't find them first. If only Truman trusts in destiny . . .