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WILL VAUXHALL CONQUER THE CLUSTER? King Albert of Vauxhall, frustrated in his efforts for vengeance against the people he blames for his son's death, is now building a navy to conquer the cluster. But the cluster sees the threat and is enhancing its own capabilities. King Albert and Isabela Febo square off in this epic conclusion to the Agency series. They're playing a high-stakes game, and only one system will survive. Will it be the isolated democracies of the cluster, or will the powerful core world monarchies extend their dominion over all of human space? What role will Sam and Jules play in this struggle?>AN INTERVIEW WITH RICH WEYAND What's the setup for Agency #5: Reprisal? In Agency #4: Marque, the King of Vauxhall's plan to use letters of marque to get his revenge didn't work, so he sets to a longer-term plan to conquer the cluster by building a new navy that can go up against the cluster's navy. But the cluster knows that's what he's doing - they bugged his office in Agency #4: Marque - and Isabela Febo decides to go after the King of Vauxhall. So Agency #4 was his letters of marque, but Agency #5 is her reprisal? Yes. She decides not to let him scheme against the cluster without interference. Who are the main characters in Agency #5: Reprisal? Oh, everybody's back. Bert Mangum and Elina Stavros, Claude Portnoy and Phyllis Stickney, Gloria Dent and Davian Varley, Jules and Sam, Serp Kendall and Marge Schofield, Isabela Febo and Michael Corliss. Even Judy Blunt is back. I got a chill on that last one. Judy Blunt is back? Oh, yes. She's back, and the leash is off, in a really big way. How did Agency #5: Reprisal write? This one wrote fast. Twenty-three writing days, at almost 3500 words per day. I even had an 8900-word day in there. Action sequences write faster, and when you get deeper in a series, they write faster. Your universe is all set up, your characters are all set up. You still describe things, but you don't have to think them up. You already did that part. What is with that cover? Another outstanding piece of original art by Luca Oleastri and Paola Giari of Rotwang Studio in Italy. It's a rip-off of 'Liberty Leading the People, ' the famous piece in the Louvre. That's Judy Blunt as Liberty. What's with the dinosaurs? Nope. That would be a major spoiler. This is the last of the Agency series? Yes. It's set up that way. I round things up pretty tight at the end. But not in such a way that there couldn't be other Agency stories. I just wrapped all the story arc of this series. All the characters of this series. So what's next for your writing? Not a clue. I usually get a lot of story ideas out of LibertyCon. That's at the end of June, so starting July 1, I'll be off on some new adventure.

IT STARTED AS A SIMPLE FAVOR... Bert Mangum, an operative for the secretive Agency, is back on the Crossroads space station waiting for a new assignment when Detective Elina Stavros of the Crossroads P.D. asks him to do her a favor. Could he help her figure out how the dangerous and illegal drug RDT is getting onto the station? But the more they dig, the more they find, until they're facing a cluster-wide drug manufacturing and smuggling operation. Worse, if they shut it down, Crossroads will go under and the economy of the cluster will go with it. Mangum, Stavros, and Sam, with help from Gloria Dent and Claude Portnoy, have to find a solution before the economy of the cluster falls down around them. .INTERVIEW WITH RICH WEYAND What's the setup for 'The Favor'? This book picks up the morning after 'Eve Of War' ends. Bert Mangum is on Crossroads station. Gloria Dent has gone to Wilbourne, and Mangum is with Elina Stavros, the beautiful police detective. She asks him if he can help track down how the dangerous drug RDT is getting onto the station. I assume they find something more than a local pusher. Yes. Spoilers are possible. But the investigation ends up spanning multiple star nations, drawing in Gloria Dent and Claude Portnoy as well as the chief executives of the six star nations of the local cluster. We have guns and assassins and thugs and evil masterminds and even nuclear weapons. And sex. Lots of sex. Well, yes. It's a spy novel. Dangerous men and dangerous women, adrenaline junkies who live their lives on the edge of danger and sudden death. Minor moral issues do not get in their way. All the same, as is my standard practice, the narrator leaves the room when things get steamy and comes back later. Sex is, by and large, not a spectator sport, and I find verbal descriptions even less interesting. How did 'The Favor' write? It started out slow. Espionage and mystery books always do for a pantser. I don't know anything more than our characters do as they dig into what's going on. I didn't know who the bad guy was until almost halfway into the book. That said, it wrote in forty-six calendar days, at about 1750 words a day. Fifteen days off in there to attend to chores that needed doing before the weather set in made it seem longer. So you wrote 'The Favor' into the dark? Oh, yes. And there are lots of twists and turns I could never have plotted out in advance. Some of them are even funny, if you have a certain kind of sense of humor. For instance, I had no idea that Gloria Dent has a wicked backhand with a cricket bat. What about the cover? Bert Mangum, Elina Stavros, Sam, and Jules. Another incredible piece of original art done for me by Luca Oleastri and Paola Giari of Rotwang Studio in Italy. That's a fetching outfit she almost has on. It's directly from the book. In the first chapter, actually. And a puppy? Yes. Spoilers are possible there, too. No further comment. What's next for your writing? I can see two more Agency books ahead in very broad form. So I will probably write those next before starting something else.

Recently widowed engineer Timothy Conner would always remember it as the day his life changed forever. The day he went to the estate sale. Timothy Conner bought an ancient book and got a cat into the bargain. But the cat and the book concealed a centuries-old secret. Conner probes that secret and releases an ancient being of unimaginable power. Life for Timothy Conner would never be the same. The world would never be the same. Because the world had never been what he had always thought it was. . INTERVIEW WITH RICH WEYAND "Hecate" is pretty clearly fantasy. This is a new genre for you? Yes, although I think of it as 'fantasy with rules.' That is, there are no deus ex machina moments, no place where our heroes are in dire straits and pull out some whiz-bang magic the reader doesn't know about. The reader is up to speed on each bit of magic by the time it is used. And the magic has to all fit together, be internally consistent, and make sense in some way. What sub-genres of fantasy is "Hecate" in? Your previous books were pretty solid in Military SF or Colonization SF or Hard SF. "Hecate" is in 'Gods and Godesses Fantasy' as well as in 'Sorcerer's Apprentice Fantasy.' The G&G Fantasy is because the main characters our hero comes in contact with are the gods and goddesses of the Greek pantheon. The basic 'what-if' question of "Hecate" is, What if the Greek gods and goddesses were real, and they were still around in the modern era? SA Fantasy is the genre of things like J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books and Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy, where someone sets out on the journey to learn magic. Our everyman hero gets caught up in the Greek pantheon's activities and has to learn their magic. How well did you stick to Greek Mythology? The players here are all characters in Greek mythology, and their family relationships to each other, their areas of expertise or oversight, and much of their personalities are all from Greek mythology. Some of the weirder parts of Greek mythology - like Athena being born fully adult from Zeus's brow after he had swallowed her mother while already pregnant - are treated as "Where do people get that stuff?" by the characters in the book. The Greek gods and goddesses did a lot of sleeping around within the family. Yes, and that's all here. Zeus and Hera, for instance, were brother and sister, were then husband and wife, and had children together. I kept all of that, as it is essential to the story of the Greek pantheon. They just didn't play by our rules. There was really no way to write that out of the book. So some of the goings-on - like Aphrodite putting the moves on Zeus, who is her father - may be strange to someone who doesn't know the story. How fast did "Hecate" write, given that you're working in a new genre? A bit over 2000 words per writing day, where I'm usually more like 2500. There were parts that wrote slowly because I had to research the Greek pantheon rather than just make everything up. There were also two science fiction conventions in there, with half a dozen days out each given travel and attendance, so in calendar days it was longer than normal. What about the cover? Paola Giari of Rotwang Studio did the cover art to my specification. It is a scene directly from the book, as all of my covers. Paola did a tremendous job on it. That is the Hecate I saw in my mind.