Part of Series
In Old Earth’s penultimate age, master criminal Luff Imbry has a good thing going: forging the jewelry of dead aristocrats who thought they were going to be interred wearing their best finery, so that a mortician accomplice can make the switch just before the burial. But things go wrong, and Imbry is squeezed between: an aristocrat who means to use a mindcontrolling mollusc to enslave the corpulent forger; and the notorious Green Circle Gang, who “come in large numbers and heavily armed, with a tendency to be terribly single-minded.” To get out from under, Imbry must travel across the Ten Thousand Worlds and confront a sinister offworlder who is reviving mysterious powers from a long-forgotten aeon when the universe was ruled by magic.
Author
Born in Liverpool, his family moved to Canada when he was five years old. Married since late 1960s, he has three grown sons. He is currently relocated to Britain. He is a former director of the Federation of British Columbia Writers. A university drop-out from a working poor background, he worked in a factory that made school desks, drove a grocery delivery truck, was night janitor in a GM dealership, and did a short stint as an orderly in a private mental hospital. As a teenager, he served a year as a volunteer with the Company of Young Canadians. He has made his living as a writer all of his adult life, first as a journalist in newspapers, then as a staff speechwriter to the Canadian Ministers of Justice and Environment, and, since 1979, as a freelance corporate and political speechwriter in British Columbia. His short fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s, Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Postscripts, Interzone, and a number of "Year’s Best" anthologies. Night Shade Books published his short story collection, The Gist Hunter and Other Stories, in 2005. He has won the Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada. His novels and stories regularly make the Locus Magazine annual recommended reading list.
