Too Rich to Die

Love and money found, lost, and crushed beyond recognition San Francisco techie Eben Scratch becomes the world's first trillionaire on his 30th birthday. Like a high-tech Scrooge, Eben's greed has ruined his life and just might ruin the world if the Time Weavers-Simon, who can choose the course of history from the intersections of past and future realities, Fiona Black, proprietor of The Intoxicating Page, a bar-bookstore where cocktails are matched to literature, Volodya Kazimer, a cold-war era Russian hacker whose software calculates the probabilities for different futures, and Winter, a beagle-can't rescue Eben from himself. Ranging from San Francisco to Paris, Mexico, India, and Vienna, Too Rich to Die melds Silicon Valley wealth, the French Revolution, and developing world sweatshops into a fast-paced story of love and money found, lost, and crushed beyond recognition. "Science fiction meets Ebenezer Scrooge in this intoxicating, modern update of A Christmas Carol. Only this time, the rich man's rants and unkindness can bring down his entire society. Well-crafted and thought-provoking."

-Heather Redmond, author of the A Dickens of a Crime series "Ransom Stephens densely packs the pages of his latest fast-paced story with elements of Dickens, warnings of technocracy, and an addiction redemption narrative. With great care, he weaves a complex story that will leave a reader shaken by dire warnings about the repetitive cycles of history and humanity. Stephens has written an ambitious, page-turning epic that is a love story, a social commentary and a dystopian fantasy all in one."

-Amber Cowie, bestselling author of Rapid Falls "Deliciously complex and steeped in the apocrypha of Silicon Valley, Too Rich to Die delivers a tale of the worst possible outcome barely diverted by humanity's better impulses. What if you not only had the power to see alternate timelines, but you had the technological prowess to pick and choose between them? Too Rich to Die is a delightful sequel to the fast-paced and complex time-bending of The 99% Solution. Stephen's trio of Timeweavers has localized a moment in time when everything changes for the worse. Now they must pull off the difficult task of changing the way a trillionaire sees the world."

-Kimberly Unger, author of The Gophers of High Charity.