Summer's End
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4.2 • 6 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
SOMETIMES A DARK PAST CAN HAUNT YOU—OTHER TIMES IT JUST MAY BE THE ONLY THING KEEPING YOU ALIVE
Fresh out of college with his Ship Engineer 3rd-Class certificate, Dave Walker’s only thought is to try to find a berth on a corporate ship plying the trade routes between the many habs, orbitals, and moons in the Solar System. The problem for Dave, however, isn’t his straight C average; it’s that his stepfather, a powerful Earth Senator he’s never met, now wants him dead.
Forced to take the first berth he can find, Dave ends up on the Iowa Hill, an old tramp freighter running with a minimal crew and nearing the end of its useful life, plying the routes that the corporations ignore and visiting the kinds of places that the folks on Earth pretend don’t exist.
Between the assassins, the criminals, and the pirates he needs to deal with, Dave is discovering that there are a lot of things out there that he still needs to learn.
But there’s one hard lesson he learned long ago that he’s being forced to remember: how to be ruthless.
At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).
John Van Stry is a United States Air Force Veteran who worked in robotics and as a flight test engineer and as a quality and test engineer in the medical devices industry. He is a collector of motorcycles and big cats. A star of the indie publishing world, Summer’s End is his first novel with Baen Books.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Family looms large even in the vastness of the cosmos in this retro space opera from Van Stry (Portals of Infinity), which would sit comfortably on a shelf of 1950s science fiction. Dave Walker, a recent engineering graduate with a checkered past, goes off-Earth to avoid being killed for political reasons by his ambitious stepfather and finds a surrogate family with the crew of a tramp space freighter. Dave sets out to earn their trust while also relying on his past as a gang member to dispose of the assassins who come after him. After the ship is besieged and Dave is captured by refugees who survive by piracy, Dave turns his technical skills to solving his sympathetic captors' problems—and so earns himself a lucrative trading partner. Settling on the dwarf planet Ceres, he plans to salvage his old freighter and start up a business that will enable him to rescue his remaining blood family from the crumbling society of Earth. Van Stry deals in the middle class of a far-future, libertarian galaxy that nevertheless is still controlled by billionaires and planetary governments. The female characters go frustratingly underdeveloped, but the action keeps the pages turning. Readers with a fondness for old style coming-of-age sci-fi will appreciate the rapid rise of Dave Walker.
