Trio of Sorcery: Arcanum 101, Drums, and Ghost in the Machine - Softcover

Lackey, Mercedes

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0765334429 ISBN 13: 9780765334428

Publisher: Tor Books, 2013

Synopsis

In Trio of Sorcery, Mercedes Lackey presents three exciting short urban fantasy novels, including the return of Diana Tregarde and the debut of a brand-new heroine for the twenty-first century.

Arcanum 101: Diana Tregarde, hero of Burning Water. Studying at Harvard, Diana is asked to investigate a fake psychic―and discovers that the psychic is not a fake...and has kidnapped a young child!

Drums: Jennifer Talldeer, hero of Sacred Ground. Nathan Begay and his girlfriend are from different tribes, but their real problem is that Caroline has attracted the attention of an angry Osage ghost. Nathan asks Jenny, an Osage shaman, for help banishing the dead warrior.

Ghost in the Machine: Ellen McBride, techno-shaman. The "boss" of an new MMORPG is out of control. A brilliant programmer as well as a magic-worker, Ellen discovers that the wendigo in the game is real―and it's about to break out of the servers and into our world!

About this title

About the Author

MERCEDES LACKEY is the USA Today and New York Times bestselling author of Valdemar series, the Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms, and many other fantasy novels. Several of her books for Tor are collaborations with James Mallory: Crown of Vengeance and the Enduring Flame trilogy, The Phoenix Unchained, The Phoenix Endangered, and The Phoenix Transformed. Lackey lives in Oklahoma.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

TRIO OF SORCERY (Chapter One)

This is the first Diana Tregarde story in decades. And in a sense this is the first Diana Tregarde story, period.

It takes place in the early 1970s and it will be hard for anyone younger than thirty to realize what a very different world that was. Computers were the size of buildings. We were still putting men on the moon, but there is more computing power in a common iPhone than there was at all of Cape Kennedy. Watergate was about to happen. Nixon hadn’t yet resigned. U.S. soldiers were still fighting and dying in Vietnam. There was no such thing as being “openly gay.” There also was no such thing as HIV.

Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Brian Jones were all recently dead of various self-indulgences, but John Lennon was still alive.

The only time you saw windmills was on a farm or in Holland.

Gas was twenty-five cents a gallon, threatening to go up to thirty.

No one had ever heard of, much less seen, a Japanese manga.

Britney Spears wasn’t even born. Neither was Leonardo DiCaprio.

Stand-up comedians only performed in nightclubs with bad reputations, or in Las Vegas. No one would consider going out for a night of comedy.

There was no MTV. Anytime there was a rock-themed television program, it was an event. There was barely cable TV. Most people made do with three channels and what was not yet called PBS. When you had cable TV, you had a whole twelve channels!

“Portable” music was via a transistor radio.

No one had ever heard of rap. And if anyone had heard a rap song, they would have considered it a quaint offshoot of beat poetry, which was so, so 1950s.

You bought most of your reading material at the drugstore from revolving racks, or digest-size monthly fiction magazines in a small magazine rack, unless you were really lucky and were in a town big enough to actually have a bookstore.

Research meant going to the library and looking things up in books.

So as you read this, if you find yourself thinking, “Well, why didn’t they just—” the answer is probably, “Because they didn’t have it then.”

Enjoy.

TRIO OF SORCERY Copyright © 2010 by Mercedes Lackey

Edition details

• Publisher: Tor Books
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0765334429
• ISBN 13: 9780765334428
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352