To Hand

Book 2 of the Valley of Fire trilogy. The privateer days are over. The war is just getting started.

Wolf traded a privateer's shares for a recruit's bunk in the King's Navy. Boot camp is the easy part. He already knows how to take orders, live in a rack, and win a knife fight. What he does not know is where Mariella went, or why the Navy seems so interested in a junkyard orphan with an interface nobody can quite explain.

Mariella has gone home to settle things with her family. It is a bigger family than she let on, with bigger problems. The Kingdom of Iraklis has enemies it has not met yet, and the people who run it would like to keep that quiet for as long as they can.

They cannot keep it quiet for long. Something is moving out past the edge of the charts, and it is not coming to trade.

From hand-to-hand training to shuttle combat school to the squadron room of a warship headed somewhere unfriendly, Wolf and Mariella find their way back to each other just in time for the shooting to start. Back home, Wolf's sister Candice gets a job offer from a very unexpected employer: wake the old battleships. The ones that have been asleep for a long time. The ones the kingdom is about to need.

Inside:
Boot camp, flight school, and fighter squadrons
Fleet battles where not everyone comes home
Battleship AIs with long memories
Family secrets on both sides of the romance
A hero and heroine who fight side by side

To Hand is military science fiction and space opera from John Van Stry, set in the universe of his Wolfhounds series. Read Misplaced first!, then follow this one with Lock & Load..and get set for:
ACCORD, book 4 in the Valley of Fire series, coming in January of 2027!

Contains adult language, violence, and sexual situations.