The Shooter Cycle

The Shooter

One shot. Three centuries of ash.

Cover of The Shooter
Status
Forthcoming
Reading order
Book 1 of The Shooter Cycle
Purchase
Not yet on sale — reservations are open.
Translations
Rights available.
Audiobook
In planning.

Synopsis

Kesh Andrun has spent eleven years as the quietest instrument of an administration that outlived the world it was built to serve. When the Outer Registry — nine surviving settlements and a legal fiction holding them together — begins to fracture, a single name is placed in his hands. He does what he was made for. What follows is not a manhunt but an inheritance: of testimony, of silence, and of the machinery that turns one act in a dying world into a founding myth. The Shooter is a novel about the distance between an event and its history, and the people who live in the gap.

The Shooter is the entry point to the Cycle. Later volumes may be read in publication order without loss.

Characters

Who you will meet

The Shooter

Kesh Andrun

A registry marksman with eleven years of service and no surviving supervisor. Precise, unromantic, and increasingly aware that he is being written down.

Registrar of the Outer Compact

Isabeau Cray

She signs the orders she does not read and reads the ones she will not sign. The Cycle's conscience, and its most dangerous archivist.

Fleet Advocate

Ovan Teel

Convoy-born lawyer arguing for four wandering generations against an institution that regards them as an accounting error.

Unnamed

The Witness

The only person in the long room who was not supposed to be there. Every later century has a different name for her.

Sample chapter

Chapter One — The Long Room

The room had been designed for a telescope and had never held one. Kesh liked it for that: a space still shaped around an instrument that never arrived, its mounting ring polished by nothing but the hands of people waiting.\n\nHe set the case down and did not open it.\n\nThrough the aperture the station's outer ring turned with the patience of something that had forgotten it was machinery. Somewhere beneath his feet, four thousand people were arguing about water rights, and in eleven hours one of them would stop.\n\nHe had been told the name twice. He had asked for it a third time and been refused, which told him more than the name had.

Questions

Frequently asked

When will The Shooter be published?
The manuscript is in structural edit. A publication date will be announced to newsletter subscribers first.
What does reserving a copy commit me to?
Nothing. A reservation costs nothing and can be cancelled at any time. It signals demand and guarantees you are contacted first when copies exist.
Will there be an audiobook?
An audiobook edition is planned. Narrator casting will be shared in the journal.
Is The Shooter a standalone novel?
It is complete in itself and it opens The Shooter Cycle, a three-century post-apocalyptic sequence. You can stop after one book. Most readers will not.
Will the book be translated?
Translation rights are available. Enquiries go through the contact page.

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