QUEEN OF HEARTS

Subject

Anna Ackner - Roma by blood, aristocrat by marriage. The servants named her for the crimson hearts she never takes off.

Location

Transylvania - a mausoleum, a Roma camp at the estate gates, and a great house with too many locked rooms. Also: Israel, 1972. Spain, after the war.

Finding

Three stories, thirty-one years apart, one bloodline. A killer the papers call the Red Ripper. A son a year in the ground. And something that answers to the name Acheron.

Assessment

Threat level: total. Contains graphic violence. Recommended: read Files 01 and 02 first.

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Recovered Text - “Eraser” · Vorkuta, USSR · 1971

“Memories… Thoughts… Emotions… ALL belong to us now.”

Book Three closes the circle. Queen of Hearts is an anthology of three stories set before and after the events of The Nameless War and Leaves in the Sun - the same universe, seen from three directions at once. It opens on a table in Vorkuta with a woman being unmade one memory at a time, and it ends on a Romanian estate where a wife decides which version of the truth her husband gets to keep. Out now - read it on Kindle.

Contents - Three Files In One

Book One - Israel, 1972

The Mirage Colloid

Thirty-one years after Leaves in the Sun. Lynn takes a BMW K 100 down an Israeli interstate at 200 km/h with a phase-shift stealth prototype and one arms dealer to reach before the traffic clears.

Book Two - Directly After File 01

Espada

Picks up where The Nameless War put down its dead. A bomb maker, a duel, a farewell to arms, and a long road out of Alicante that nobody walks clean.

Book Three - Before File 01

Queen of Hearts

The title story, and the furthest back the series has gone. Lady Anna Ackner shelters the Roma at her gates while a killer carves through them, her husband grieves a son into the arms of opium, and something wearing Gabriel's face walks back through the door.

Reading the first two novels is not required, but it is strongly recommended - the anthology assumes you know the universe, the fantasy, and what the espionage costs.