The Deceivers — Alfred Bester

Alfred Bester was, and remains, long after his passing, the preeminent Class Act of imaginative literature. Bester was the mountain, all the rest of us merely climbers toward that peak. --Harlan EllisonAlfred Bester took readers where none had gone before in his seminal fifties novel, The Stars My Destination-- the story of a young man's desperate journey from adolescence to most-wanted-man of the 25th century. In The Deceivers, Bester reinvented the space opera for the late 20th century. The hero is Rogue Winter -- King of the Maori Commandos ... His lover is the beautiful Demi Jeroux, who has been kidnapped by ... The villainous, demonic Manchu Duke of Death. Rogue must search through the entire solar system to find the missing Demi Jeroux, from the Paradise of Carnal Pleasures to the bloody torture chambers of Triton. It is in the subterranean chambers beneath the surface of Triton that the key to the whole adventure lies. Buried here is the sole source of the newly discovered Meta-crystals, which hold the secret to unlimited energy for all mankind. Demi Jeroux is merely a pawn in the Duke of Death's gambit to seize control of the crystals and place the entire solar system at his mercy. Rogue's final confrontation with the Duke will determine not only the fate of his beloved, but the future of the system and its freedom from the evil Manchu Empire.