Series: Book 1 in the Andrea Cort series
Rating: *****
Tags: EN-SciFi, Lang:en
Summary
Two stories from the early years of Andrea Cort, later the
heroine of the Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel,
Emissaries from the Dead.
"The Coward's Option": On the hostile home-world of the
Caith, Andrea Cort has been assigned the case of a murderer
who's been condemned to a horrible death. All legal options
have been exhausted, but the Caith offer a rarely-used
alternative to execution, one that purports to ensure that the
accused will never break the law again. Alas, it's not so much
another chance at life, but deliverance into a hell far worse
than mere death...
"Tasha's Fail-Safe": Once, she and Andrea Cort hated each
other. Now, the victim of a savage assassination attempt by a
traitor to the Confederacy, she lies in an unresponsive state,
the identity of her assailant locked inside her head. Can
Andrea penetrate a vital secret she never even knew
existed?