Minder Rising

In the future, the Citizen Protection Service tests all children for minder talents, and recruits the best.

Agent Lièrén Sòng is recovering from a near-fatal crash. He should want to get back to interrogating criminals for his covert CPS field unit, but being sidelined gains new appeal when he makes friends with a woman and her son. Imara Sesay, road crew chief and part-time bartender, breaks her ironclad rule never to get close to customers when she asks Lièrén to teach her son how to control his growing minder talents.

Unexpected deaths in his field unit make Lièrén suspect he isn’t a lucky survivor, he’s a loose end. He should pull away from Imara and Derrit to keep them safe, but when the local CPS Testing Center is entirely too interested in Derrit’s talents, Lièrén must make an impossible choice. Can he stay alive long enough to save Imara and her prodigy son?

Minder Rising is a standalone second book in the acclaimed Central Galactic Concordance science fiction series.

Carol Van Natta is an independent author. Her books include Overload Flux, Minder Rising, and Zero Flux in the new science fiction romance Central Galactic Concordance series, and Hooray for Holopticon, a retro SF comedy. Overload Flux won a 2015 SFR Galaxy Award. She shares her Fort Collins, Colorado, home with a sometime mad scientist and various cats. Any violations of the laws of physics in her books are the fault of the cats, not the mad scientist.