Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars, Book Two

Former assassin Raena Zacari thinks she’s left the past behind. The Imperial torturer who trained her is dead; the human empire is disbanded; and she is finally free.

But Raena is troubled by a series of nightmares that always seem to end with her shooting an ex-lover in the head. She needs to get her mind clear because there’s a flaw in the most commonly used starship drive—and the band of media-obsessed pirates she’s fallen in with is right at the heart of the controversy.

With humanity scattered across the galaxy, she’s going to have to rely on the alien crew members of the Veracity to help her put the pieces together. It doesn’t help that the Templars— wiped out in a genetic plague while Raena was imprisoned—have left booby-trapped biotechnology scattered across the galaxy.

Kill by Numbers mixes military science fiction with sweeping space opera that features aliens, androids, drug dealers, journalists, and free-running media hackers. Kill by Numbers is the second book in Loren Rhoads’s epic Dangerous Type trilogy.

Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.

Loren Rhoads is the author of Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues, Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel, co-author (with Brian Thomas) of the novel As Above, So Below, and editor of The Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two. She was the editor of the cult nonfiction magazine Morbid Curiosity for ten years and runs the website CemeteryTravel.com, where she blogs about graveyards as tourist destinations. Rhoads resides in San Francisco, California.