A triumph of the New Space Opera: fast, complicated, wonder-filled!Hugo Award finalist and Robert A. Heinlein Award–winning SF writer Michael

Flynn now turns to space opera with stunningly successful results. Full of rich

echoes of space opera classics from Doc Smith to Cordwainer Smith, The

January Dancer tells the fateful story of an ancient pre-human artifact of

great power, and the people who found it.Starting with Captain Amos

January, who quickly loses it, and then the others who fought, schemed, and

killed to get it, we travel around the complex, decadent, brawling, mongrelized

interstellar human civilization the artifact might save or destroy. Collectors

want the Dancer; pirates take it, rulers crave it, and they’ll all kill if

necessary to get it. This is a thrilling yarn of love, revolution, music, and

mystery, and it ends, as all great stories do, with shock and a

beginning.

The Hound Bridget ban has vanished and the Kennel (the mysterious superspy

agency) has given up looking for her. But her daughter, the harper Mearana, has

not, and she has convinced the scarred man, Donovan, to aid in her search.But Donovan’s mind has been shattered by Those of Name, the rulers of the

Confederacy, and no fewer than seven quarreling personalities now inhabit his

skull. How can he hope to see Mearana safely through her quest?Together, they follow Bridget ban’s trail to the raw worlds of the frontier,

edging ever closer to the de-civilized and barbarian planets of the Wild. Along

the way, they encounter evidence that they too are being followed—by a deadly

agent of Those of Name.From BooklistOn the harper Mearana’s home planet, up Jim

River is a saying indicating a journey ever further into danger and the

unknown. Mearana’s mother, Bridget ban, has disappeared on mysterious business.

Even the Kennel, her employer and one of the galaxy’s two sources of secret

agents, didn’t know what she was looking for or where she went. Mearana is

determined, though, to discover her mother’s fate. She manages to convince the

scarred man, the Fudir, who was once Donovan but became six or seven

personalities after a botched experiment by Those of Name, to join her out of a

sense of nostalgia. The worlds inhabited by these people are sufficient reason

to read the novel. The extrapolations of linguistic drift and remnants of

ancient history that Flynn conjures constitute a fascinating story in

themselves. Adding to them a tense and thrilling search from the bar on Jehovah

to the very Wild itself, through strange cultures and dangerous ports, just

makes the book all the more engaging.

It’s a big Spiral Arm, and the scarred man, Donavan buigh, has gone missing in

it, upsetting the harper Mearana’s plans for a reconciliation between her

parents. Bridget ban, a Hound of the League, is unconvinced that reconciliation

is either possible or desirable; but nonetheless has dispatched agents to

investigate the disappearance. After all, Donovan had once done the favor for

her (in Up Jim River).There is a struggle in the Lion’s Mouth, the bureau that oversees the Shadows—a

clandestine civil war of sabotage and assassination between those who would

overthrow Those of Name and the loyalists who support them. And Donovan, one

time Confederal agent, has been recalled to take a key part, willingly or no.

The secret war among the Shadows of the Name is escalating, and there are

hints that it is not so secret as the Shadows had thought. The scarred man,

Donovan buigh, half honored guest and half prisoner, is carried deeper into

the Confederation, all the way to Holy Terra herself, to help plan the rebel

assault on the Secret City. If he does not soon remember the key information

locked inside his fractured mind, his rebel friends may resort to torture to

pull it from his subconscious.Meanwhile, Bridget ban has organized a posse—a

pack of Hounds—to go in pursuit of her kidnapped daughter, despite knowing

that Ravn Olafsdottr kidnapped the harper precisely to lure Bridget ban in her

wake. The Hound, the harper, and the scarred man wind deeper into a web of

deceit and treachery certain of only one thing: nothing, absolutely nothing,

is what it seems to be.