Ris­ing Sun cover

In late Fall 2012, I fin­ished the last revi­sions on Shadow on the Sun, the final book in the Hell’s Cross (my name for the series)/Sun/Durango books.  I was relieved–after more than a year and sev­eral sub­stan­tial revi­sions, the book and the series were finally done.

Now, I could take a breather and left my worn out fin­gers take a rest. No sooner did I hit the send but­ton that an email arrived from my edi­tor, request­ing that I write a e-novella pre­quel to the series and have it fin­ished for a Feb­ru­ary launch. I laughed because there was no way I could write a 24k novella in that amount of time, and then I said yes. Because even though I had fin­ished with the series, I knew that there would always be sto­ries to tell in Durango’s world. How could I pass up the chance?

For the next month, I wrote what became a long novella, almost 38k words. We shrank it a bit on revi­sion, but not by much. Laid out like a tra­di­tional book, it’s a 160 page novel, which is about half the length of the other nov­els in the series. I hope that it’s big enough to sat­isfy the reader and that some of the answers about Durango’s back­story are enough to sat­isfy your curiosity–a lit­tle bit, at least.

Offi­cial Blurb:

Ris­ing Sun is a stand-alone 125-page novella, a pre­quel to David Macin­nis Gill’s acclaimed Black Hole Sun, of which Suzanne Collins said, “Black Hole Sun rock­ets read­ers to new fron­tiers … action-packed.”

Jacob Stringfel­low, aka Durango, once had a promis­ing career in the elite armed forces. That was before. Before his father betrayed him and his unit. Before he almost died and had an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence flash-cloned to his brain. Now Durango and Mimi (the AI) are fig­ur­ing out how to get along and fig­ur­ing out how to stay in the game. Set on a vio­lent and unfor­get­table dystopian Mars, this is a must read for fans of the author’s Black Hole Sun tril­ogy and for any­one who loves intense, action-packed sci­ence fiction.

So here it is, the start of Durango and Mimi together. For those of you who keep count, this is Hell’s Cross Num­ber 0.  It’s avail­able on all ebook for­mats for $1.99.

Avail­able at:

ISBN: 9780062273024; ISBN10: 0062273027; Imprint: Green­wil­low Books ; On Sale: 2/5/2013; For­mat: eBook; Trim­size: ; Pages: 161; $1.99; Ages: 14 and Up