Nighthawks at the Mission
by Forbes West
Genre: science fiction, fantasy
Available from Amazon.
Young Sarah from Southern California travels off-world and falls in with magic-using criminals who work at night to avoid ruthless aliens and make off with the hi-tech rewards found there. A ghost from her past, a mysterious boyfriend and drug addiction all threaten to derail her strange new life.
Excerpt:
“Stop crawling around like that,” Mathias says to you, as fast as he can spit out the words. “Stop crawling around like that, you ain’t a bug, you’re a woman, for crissake. Be a woman.”
You feel yourself lifted off the ground and slammed back onto the side of the Karmann Ghia. You don’t even see Mathias flick his ori-baton with his wrist—seemingly he just thought it and it happened.
You watch the two of them and try to hang on to the car like a drowning man trying to cling to a life preserver. There’s a fire in your leg. It is horrible to look at—a blackened, cauterized, and still slightly bloody mess where your knee is supposed to be.
“Cat got your tongue and gotcha by the short ‘airs, is that right? Sarah Oooooooooorange?” Mathias says, frightening you with his knowledge of exactly who you are.
What others are saying:
…[A]t the heart of this fun romp through the shimmering dark of a fascinating alien world and a classic “finding yourself” tale is well cut, enthusiastic, mindbending prose that seems tailor-made for a tale of high adventure set in a strange alien world where anything can happen.-Nick Cole, author of “The Wasteland Saga” and “Soda Pop Soldier”
Ian McEvoy is done with Scotland. No one’s ever used his first name – Ian; he’s always been just McEvoy. The Scotsman is leaving his hardscrabble childhood behind and looking for adventure. McEvoy soaks up science like a sponge. Through scientists he encounters, he learns about profound puzzles built into the fabric of nature. His personal challenge is his tenuous grip on reality. McEvoy forges on from his boisterous youth in the Arizona desert to a surprising climax in the twilight zone of northern Sweden. Does McEvoy’s final insight tell us about our own sense of what is real?