But now for the first time - suddenly, shockingly, horribly - the balance of power had shifted and the rats began to prey on the human population.

    The age of star formation is long past. Yet there is life here, feeding off the energies of the stellar remnants, and there is mind, a tremendous galaxy-spanning intelligence each of whose thoughts lasts a hundred thousand years. And this mind cradles memories of a long-gone age when a more compact universe was full of light... The 27th century: Proxima Centauri, an undistinguished red dwarf star, is the nearest star to our sun. How would it be to live on such a world?

    As a former FBI agent with experience in the field and the lab, Dakota combines the wit and grit of PIs Marlowe and Spenser with the ratiocination of Sherlock Holmes.However his Watson is anything but. A Ukrainian-American chess champion with runway legs, predator eyes and fluency in seven languages, SVETLANA KRÜSH brings worldly panache to their cases, or, as Svetlana would have you believe, she “solves the crimes and handles the money.”