The Bloodline Feud: an omnibus edition of the first two novels in Charles Stross' The Merchant Princes series The six families of the Clan rule the kingdom of Gruinmarkt from behind the scenes. They are a mixture of nobility and criminal conspirators whose power to walk between their world and ours makes them rich in both. Miriam, a hip tech journalist from Boston, discovers her alternate\-world relatives with explosive results that shake three worlds. Now, as the prodigal Countess Helge Thorold\-Hjorth, she finds herself ensnared in schemes and plots centuries in the making. She is surrounded by unlikely allies, lethal contraband, and—most dangerous of all—her family. To avoid a slippery slope down to an unmarked grave, Miriam must build a power base of her own—with unexpected consequences for three different time lines, including the quasi\-Victorian one exploited by the hidden family.

Miriam was an ambitious business journalist in Boston. Until she was fired—then discoverd, to her shock, that her lost family comes from an alternate reality. And although some of them are trying to kill her, she won’t stop digging up secrets. Now that she knows she's inherited the family ability to walk between worlds, there’s a new culture to explore. Her alternate home seems located around the Middle Ages, making her world\-hopping relatives top dogs when it comes to ‘importing’ guns and other gadgets from modern\-day America. Payment flows from their services to US drug rings—after all, world\-skipping drug runners make great traffickers. In a land where women are property, she struggles to reman independent. Yet her outsider ways won’t be tolerated, and a highly political arranged marriage is being brokered behind her back. If she can stay alive for long enough to protest.

Miriam Beckstein has said goodbye to her comfort zone. The transition from journalist to captive in an alternative timeline was challenging to say the least. As was discovering her long\-lost family, the Clan, were world\-skipping assassins. Now civil war rages in her adopted home, she's pregnant with the heir to their throne and a splinter\-group want her on their side of a desperate power struggle. But as a leader or figurehead? Meanwhile, unknown to the Clan, the US government is on to them and preparing to exploit this knowledge. But it hadn't foreseen a dissident Clan faction carrying nuclear devices between worlds\-\-with the US president in their sights. The War on Terror is about to go transdimensional. But Mike Fleming, CIA agent, knows the most terrifying secret of all. His government's true intentions. At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied.