Patrick Swenson Book order (chronological)

Dave Crowell is a hero of the eight worlds of the Union, but he doesn't want fame or fortune. These days he just wants to run his private detective business with his partner and forget about the Ultras, the insidious aliens that attacked the Union, then vanished. But a client turns up dead under mysterious circumstances, and Crowell knows the Ultras have not gone away. With the help of a beautiful alien, he uncovers fragments of memory that might lead to his missing father. When it becomes clear that Crowell's past also contains the information he needs to save the Union, he is caught up in a conspiracy beyond his understanding and pulled into an underworld drug war on a hostile planet. With the crisis deepening, Crowell must learn the answer to the biggest question of all: Where are the Ultras?

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 . . .

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.