Skeen's Return — Jo Clayton

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.