Tandemstar: The Outcast Cycle

Dib is an Earthlike planet, only slightly smaller, with shorter days and longer years, in orbit around twin suns.

On the continent of Geo, in the city of Velon in the nation of Inimata, a man lies dead in his study.

The Murdered Monk

In life, Professor Orno Linus was a world-class scholar: an astrophysicist, a dead-language linguist, and an expert in (and apparent true believer of) the religious concept of the Cull, i.e., the end of the world. Widely respected, nothing about Linus’s expertise suggests somebody might want him dead.

Professor Linus is also Brother Linus, a high-ranking member of an ancient, powerful religious organization known as the House. This makes his murder much more complicated, but no more explicable, because murder on House grounds just doesn’t happen. Not even when one of the last things the victim did was steal something important from the House vault.

Finally, Orno is also the younger brother of Calcut Linus, one of the most powerful and criminally dangerous people on the planet. Killing any Linus means incurring the wrath of a man for whom laws very rarely apply.

In short, Professor Orno Linus is a highly unlikely murder victim.

And yet, somebody killed him.

The Cursed Detective

Detective Makk Stidgeon already knows he’s unlucky. He’s a cholem: an outcast. A bad-luck charm. He was born this way, and has the brand on his wrist to prove it.

But in terms of bad luck, the gods have really gone overboard by sticking him with the Linus case.

Between a House leadership that seems more interested in retrieving their stolen artifact than in solving the murder of one of their own, the demands of the murderous Calcut Linus, a new partner who seems to know more than she’s telling, and an omnipresent news media constantly looking for an angle on the biggest story of the year, Makk barely has time to just follow the clues.

And that’s before an impossible video surfaces that purports to reveal the killer’s identity. What makes it impossible? The person in the video couldn’t have possibly done it.

To get to the bottom of the Orno’s murder, Makk will have to navigate between the House and the Linus family, find the source of the video, and figure out what’s missing from the House vault. Even if he can pull all that off, he may discover he’s not at the end of a mystery at all, but at the beginning of a much larger one.

Tandemstar: The Outcast Cycle. The journey begins here.

Welcome to the Middle Kingdoms, the most peculiar place on Dib, where the royalty all look like one another and also like the five founding gods of creation. Nine feudal theocracies that haven’t embraced new technology in three thousand years, the Middle Kingdoms is a land that never changes, surrounded by a world that changes constantly.

A Death in the Family

Battine Alconnot made a promise to return to Castle Totus for the Feast of Nita. She’d very much like to break that promise, except that it was made on her mother’s deathbed, to her sister Porra. Disappointing Porra Alcon wouldn’t be wise under any circumstance, but it’s doubly so given she’s also Queen Porra, wife to King Ho-Kenson, sovereign of Totus kingdom.

Batt hasn’t felt genuinely welcome—in court or among her own family—since she was a child, because Battine is a rare descendant of royalty who doesn’t look like it. The gods chose not to smile upon her, genetically. She’s an unblessed. An outcast. Still, she goes. And when a member of the royal family is murdered in the castle, she’s the first person accused.

Of course.

Battine teams up with the other most likely suspect—an outsider named Damid Magly who knows more than he’s telling—to find the real killer. What they find instead is far more serious.

There are secrets buried deep beneath the kingdoms…secrets that could destroy the royal families, and secrets that could alter the future of the entire planet.

The Man in the Sky

Meanwhile, in Velon, Detective Makk Stidgeon is dealing with the fallout from the Orno Linus murder case. The county attorney wants Makk to find more evidence, while Orno’s brother Calcut mostly just wants Makk dead. His ex-partner, Viselle Daska, remains missing, as does her father, Ba-Ugna Kev. Both are wanted for murder.

Makk is also sitting on two things Orno Linus risked his life to steal from the House vaults. They’re important, but he has no idea why.

Now comes an odd proposal: Ba-Ugna Kev wants to turn himself in. But he has conditions. He wants to surrender to Makk personally, he wants the Veeser Elicasta Sangristy to be there as well, and he expects them to come alone.

Kev can tie everything together: Orno’s murder, the stolen artifacts, and what his daughter has to do with all of it. But he’s also tried to kill Makk and Elicasta once already, and to retrieve him they’ll have to go to the one place where they’re guaranteed to have nobody watching their backs: the space station Lys.

The Madness of Kings is the thrilling second book in Tandemstar: The Outcast Cycle.

In the heart of the authoritarian country of Wivvol, astronaut Xto Djbbit is about to embark on his first mission off-planet when the exiled High Hat of Chnta comes to him with an unusual request: help smuggle a Septal artifact out of Wivvol. It’s an impossible favor to ask of Xto, yet impossible to refuse; the High Hat of Chnta is also his uncle.

Awaiting for Xto in space is his estranged father—who has his own impossible favors—and a mysterious anomaly whose secrets Xto is uniquely positioned to unlock.

On Lys, the space station for the super-wealthy, former Septal Other Dorn Jimbal struggles to understand what Professor Orno Linus learned before his untimely murder. Did Orno truly figure out how to stop the Outcast?

To get to the heart of Linus’s research, Dorn is going to have to work with the one person they absolutely cannot trust: Viselle Daska.

In The Ocean in the Sky, the third book of Tandemstar: The Outcast Cycle, Xto and Dorn will both make discoveries that change the course of all life on the planet. Both will wish they hadn’t.