Chasing the Dragon

In a galaxy where loyalty is rare and survival is never guaranteed, Tyrus Rechs takes on a job that defies every instinct that's kept him alive this long. The target isn't a criminal to be eliminated — it's a young warrior trained since childhood to be a perfect killing machine, and Rechs has promised an old friend to bring the kid back breathing. What follows is a pursuit that strips away the clean moral lines of a standard bounty hunt and replaces them with something harder and more human: the question of whether a person shaped entirely by violence can be pulled back from the edge before it's too late.

Anspach and Cole write action the way it actually feels — kinetic without being chaotic, brutal without losing emotional weight. The pacing here is relentless but never reckless, and Rechs himself remains one of genre fiction's most compelling protagonists: weathered, morally serious, and carrying a history that keeps pressing through the present. The authors understand that the best science fiction uses its exotic settings to illuminate something true about people, and this book delivers exactly that without ever slowing down long enough to become self-congratulatory about it.