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eBook Category: Mystery/Crime/Mystery/Crime
eBook Description: If you've read Adept, then you know just how strange the world really is and what happened when Susan Milton and David Braun got mixed up in the theft of the Marker. Well, one year on and the Marker is still missing. Susan, David and the Professor have a plan to get it back, but before they can put it into effect, they make the mistake of recruiting Jo Hallett to help them. As well as a ferocious intellect, she's self-absorbed, unreliable and a disruption to any team she joins--not to mention a gift to its enemies. But she also holds the key to a mystery that's defeated a hundred generations of fanatics: what power lies behind the Marker and the remarkable talents of those who covet it? If she can avoid betraying her friends and being caught or killed by their enemies the answer can be hers--in exchange for her life. In Ex Machina, Jo tells her story.

eBook Publisher: Snowbooks/Snowbooks
Fictionwise Release Date: November 2006

3 Reader Ratings:

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I?ve never actually been to prison, so this is a guess, but I bet when you get out you don't think I know, I'll write my prison memoirs now, while it?s all still lovely and fresh. I should think the first thing you do is try to blot it all out (check your phone-book under booze, hookers, tattoo removal, disney world(R)). Like I say, I?ve never been to prison, but nevertheless these are my prison memoirs and I?m writing them now, before I forget, even though it?s the last thing I want to do. In case you're interested, what this has taught me is that a person really can change, but without doubt there?s a price to pay. Starting over means you lose touch with who you were. Your old memories begin to feel like someone else?s, some person you don't know very well? which is a more than a little unsettling. It?s like finding the aftermath of someone else?s shopping spree on your credit card statement, someone else?s low grades messing up your college transcript or someone else?s hair clogging up your shower drain. (You'd probably got the message even before that last example.) At any rate, the new-improved-you can still remember all of the bad decisions the old-you made. Your memory is full of all those stupid things, but the motives no longer make sense to you. What was I thinking? Why did that seem like the smart thing to do? How could my thoughts have been so small? Because the truth is that you find you can't squeeze back inside your old way of viewing the world anymore; the new you won't fit. You can't unlearn the lessons that caused you to grow and you can't wriggle back into your old, cramped mindset. That?s what I meant about prison. I feel like I was trapped inside that claustrophobic maze of wrong choices and bad instincts for so long that it?s a blissful relief to be free ? despite what I went through. And I wish I could part company with that old me forever. But instead I?m clinging on to it, doing my best to record those thoughts before understanding evaporates, the way a confusing dream begins to evaporate once you wake up. I?m going to relive it all so that I can explain it to you. So welcome to the old, even-more-annoying me. You'll have to put up with my day-to-day trivia for a little while before we get to the real meat-and-potatoes, because it?s all bound up together. So let?s get on with it. My name is Jo, which (regrettably) is short for Josephine, and the story I need to tell you starts in Cornwall. That?s in the windy south-west tip of some rainy islands just off the north coast of Europe, in case you don't know. I?ve spent about nine of my twenty-six years in those islands, but I still think of myself as American. I prefer the big city, but at this point I?m a long way from what I prefer: I?m in the middle of nowhere. How did I get here? Well, I think you could say that finding a post-doc slot was always going to be a challenge for me. But that?s fine; I didn't really want a conventional position, the mainstream kind most people compete for. I?m not into that straight-ahead, plain-vanilla academia. Besides, all the fertile dirt is in the gaps between the disciplines. If you can find yourself a niche that?s new and still a little precarious, you tend to find that the rules are looser and the people are weird enough that they don't notice your foibles. In between the disciplines there?s not much status quo to disturb and no traditional way of doing things, so my (ahem) unconventional résumé is less of a...