The City of Cries — Catherine Asaro

Major Bhaajan returns to the desolate, sand-swept world of her rough-edged childhood because her detective skills have earned her a lucrative assignment: find a runaway son of the ruling dynasty. Forays into Raylicon's Underworld, treachery, encounters with gangsters and an old flame are just some of the challenges facing Major Bhaajan in pursuit of the missing aristocrat. "The City of Cries" novella is included in the 2011 WindyCon collection of Catherine Asaro's writings called AURORA IN FOUR VOICES


"Asaro's Skolian saga is ... in many ways as compelling as DUNE, if not more so."
- Booklist

"Readers seeking the harmonious meld of hard SF's rigor and human chemistry's heat should read Catherine Asaro's fiction."
- SciFi Weekly

"Asaro's portrait of interstellar intrigue, weird socio-political customs and galactic history has come to approach the neighborhood of such classics as Frank Herbert's DUNE series."

on the Skolian Empire series:
"One of the major series in the genre."
- SF Chronicle

Catherine Asaro is a Nebula Award winner for her novel The Quantum Rose, part of her popular Skolian Empire series, and the novella “The Spacetime Pool.” Her novels have three times been named the best science fiction novel of the year by Romantic Times Book Club. She has won numerous other awards, including the Analog Readers Poll award, the Homer, and the Sapphire award. She has an M.A. in physics, and a Ph.D. in chemical physics, both from Harvard, and has done research at the University of Toronto, The Max Planck Institute, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. A former ballet and jazz dancer, she founded the Mainly Jazz Dance program at Harvard and danced on both the west and east coasts. Her previous books for Baen were Sunrise Alley, its sequel, Alpha, and two novels in her Skolian Empire series, The Ruby Dice and Diamond Star. For Diamond Star, she also cut a CD of the same name with the rock band Point Valid, which offers a soundtrack to the book. She continues to compose and perform, and appears in concert at science fiction cons. Catherine has written fourteen novels in the popular Skolian Saga -- Carnelians being the latest -- several fantasies, including The Charmed Sphere, and the near-future thrillers The Veiled Web and The Phoenix Code.