Elam Vandreren arrives on Cabot's Landing expecting to become the planet's Resident and caretaker. Instead he finds himself investigating a grisly crime and uncovering even more disturbing secrets.
When Elam finds the prior Resident murdered, he thinks the Resident's spouse did it. Sigurd van Dorstadt, the investigator from the transport ship
Zuiderkruis, thinks Elam did it. They both think no one else is on the planet.
It turns out they're both wrong--about everything.
Although Elam and Sigurd don't like each other, they join forces with a team from
Zuiderkruis to find the truth. The evidence soon points to unknown criminals hiding out in the ruins of an ancient military base--and they're not the planet's only other inhabitants.
When part of their team is taken hostage, Elam and Sigurd barely escape with their lives. To survive and rescue their friends, they must rely on each other and make an alliance with a secretive group called the Left Behind. But the more of Cabot's Landing's secrets they uncover and the more their feelings for each other grow, the more fraught their decisions become. With duty and honor at odds with their hearts, can Elam and Sigurd strike a balance they can live with?
Max Griffin is a gay man, a husband, a father, a writer, and a mathematician. Max creates fictional worlds with a breadth informed by globe-spanning travels, a depth provided by the rigor of science, and an excitement generated by a lifetime of seeking out new ideas and meeting new people. Max writes characters with passionate hearts, bright minds, and goals that matter.
Max's professional career has spanned over thirty years at a major research university in the US Southwest. His duties included faculty appointments in mathematics and electrical engineering, senior academic positions, and participation in the executive leadership. Teaching responsibilities involved world-wide travel and deep engagement with diverse cultures and peoples. His research includes numerous mathematical monographs and graduate textbooks on real analysis and on probability. He has served on dozens of doctoral committees in fields as diverse as music theory and interplanetary laser communication systems.
Max's journey as a gay man includes a midlife self-evaluation and coming out. While this could have turned out many ways, some of them bad, it instead turned out to be life-affirming for all involved.Today, Max is blessed by strong relationships with his current husband, Gene, with his daughter and her two children, and even with his ex-wife who has since remarried.
Sometimes alien creatures populate Max'sfiction. He has direct experience with those too. You see, two Russian Bluecats, Boris and Natasha, are the true owners of the house they share with Max and Gene. Boris and Natasha keep the two humans as their pets in return for feeding them and petting them. Oh, and there's that cat litter thing they do too. Despite what you might expect, there are no signs of moose or squirrel in the household.
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