Skeen's Return

Trapped in an alternate dimension, the tough and self-confident Skeen confronts slavers, monsters, and alien assassins in a fast-paced space adventure.   Skeen is back! Sexy space pilot and larcenous scoundrel—a tomb raider who could give Lara Croft a serious run for her money—the tough, cunning, and seductive master thief takes on a series of Herculean trials in her attempts to escape an alternate dimension in a witty and wonderful hybrid of science fiction and fantasy, space opera and quest adventure, that will enthrall fans of Andre Norton, Anne McCaffrey, and Alan Dean Foster.   A fugitive “rooner” wanted by law enforcers throughout the known universe, Skeen has grit, cunning, and a closet full of more skeletons than a suburban cemetery. Now, the intergalactic outlaw is stuck in a dimension that is not her own, surrounded by a small mob of new friends and followers representing the eight different races that inadvertently stumbled into Mistommerk over the centuries. Each member of the motley entourage shares the same goal: to find a way out through the elusive Stranger’s Gate.   Their road to a possible exit is twisted and dangerous, with all sorts of nastiness waiting around every turn, from hired killers to bizarre ravenous beasts to the terrible shape-shifting Sea Min. Skeen is proving to be a most wily, brave, and determined, if reluctant, leader. But with a confusing plethora of portals leading to numerous strange dimensions and worlds overlapping other worlds, she may be hard pressed to find the right way back—even if she does somehow manage to survive.   A masterwork of ingenious world-building and wild invention, beloved science fiction author Jo Clayton’s Skeen’s Return is a welcome return to the delightfully bizarre universe and alien life-forms so brilliantly imagined in Skeen’s Leap, the first volume in an enthralling trilogy featuring one of the most endearingly outrageous heroines in contemporary speculative fiction.