The Shadow Sister Ryana, the very Shadow of Death, is marrying her beloved and joining his gypsy clan. War took her innocence, and now she’s determined to rebuild her life. But religious cults are springing up, and the gypsies come under attack. Ryana’s best friend in the Sisters, Jelena, has fled to join one of the cults, and the senior Sister asks Ryana to find out why. Too late, Ryana discovers their enemies have a sweet and seductive weapon, one that has turned Jelena into her enemy. R...

Ryana, a worthless girl-child, is sold to a mysterious woman who takes her to the home of the Shadow Sisters who are prized for their abilities as spies and assassins. She survives years of training in spite of being unconventional: adopting poisonous bats as familiars—something no one else would dare to do; choosing the blow dart as her weapon of choice—a weapon the Sisters don’t teach; and relying on intuition rather than logic. As she completes her training, the Shadow Sisters are under...

Anna nearly dies, along with all her family, at age four from the deadly Cacao virus. But she survives, thanks to a poisonous red-headed krait. The medical community is excited since there is no known cure for the virus, but Anna and her snake, Red, have a symbiotic relationship—containment, not cure. If she is ever separated from Red, she will die.Anna struggles through foster homes. As her krait becomes known and valuable throughout the three star empires as one of only a handful...

Anna’s nice comfortable world is in turmoil. Because of their success in destroying the foreign Raiders, Anna, Kris, and Adrian were promoted to full commander, and the project team was disbanded. Kris and Adrian were given NIA offices to manage on Stone Ring and Westar, and Anna is being pressured to move to Eastar to manage the NIA station. That would mean she would have to move away from home and Alexa, who Anna considers her refuge. In addition, she would be exposed to new people whose...

Anna and her Naval Intelligence Agency (NIA) teammates have a new high-priority assignment: foreign raiders who are wreaking havoc within the United Alliance of Stars. They hit high value targets, have access to inside information, kill the security guards, and leave no witnesses.The NIA team soon discovers the raiders’ system has been well thought out and has no weak links to exploit. The raiders prove arrogant, resourceful, and in no hurry to leave. So when the raiders discover t...

An insidious cabal has decided to change the direction of the United Alliance of Stars (UAS) with a coup d’etat—but not through a military takeover. They have devised a subtler coup: the manipulation of the Committee, the fifteen-star system that sets policy for the UAS.This group of terrorists, calling itself WEP—for “We the People”—have issued an ultimatum: revise the UAS Constitution, or they will kill those who oppose the change. And good to their word, shortly afterward, Commi...

Anna’s success as the Eastar NIA station chief has catapulted her into the position of Director of NIA Stations. Anna is uncomfortable with the promotion and bored. She has a master chief secretary, a lieutenant aide-de-camp, and fifteen commanders and their staff to do the work. But she suspects not all of her commanders are happy with their new, very young admiral or are doing their jobs. But she has no way to observe those commanders as their stations reside on distant systems.A...

Polycentric Governance and the Good Society: A Normative and Philosophical Investigation offers an examination of the idea of polycentric governance as one of the pillars of a flourishing human society. Rather than following the conventional path of suppressing complexity and diversity for the sake of reaching agreement on justice and political stability, David Thunder and Pablo Paniagua see complexity and diversity as assets that should be leveraged to make the "Open Society" a m...

This book offers a systematic, sociological and penological exploration of the most up-to-date uses of electronic tagging (also known as electronic monitoring). With increasingly overcrowded prisons, electronic tagging has been proposed as an alternative form of punishment, and interest in this topic is growing throughout Europe. Current debates and research have often been limited to policy evaluation and effectiveness, whereas Electronic Monitoring examines the brand of punishme...

This edited book explores how requests and complaints by prisoners are being dealt with by prison governors/administrations or independent bodies (such as complaint commissions), in different parts of Europe. It asks who complains and why? How are complaints from prisoners being dealt with, from a legal and empirical point of view? How do procedures work and can they be considered effective? Should administrative procedures be exhausted before appealing to a judge? It explores whether such...

Is there something distinctive about penology in Europe? Do Europeans think about punishment and penal policy in a different way to people in other parts of the globe? If so, why is this the case and how does it work in practice? This book addresses some major and pressing issues that have been emerging in recent years in the interdisciplinary field of 'European penology', that is, a space where legal scholarship, criminology, sociology and political science meet - or should meet - in orde...

Social Complexity and Complex Systems in Archaeology turns to complex systems thinking in search of a suitable framework to explore social complexity in Archaeology.Social complexity in archaeology is commonly related to properties of complex societies such as states, as opposed to so-called simple societies such as tribes or chiefdoms. These conceptualisations of complexity are ultimately rooted in Eurocentric perspectives with problematic implications for the field of ar...