About The Tenth Man
Written by Tamara Sheehan
Print Information:
188 pages / 48000 words / 5x8 trade paperback
ISBN: 978-1-60370-553-0, 1-60370-553-8
eBook Information:
136 pages / 48000 words
Available file types - html,
lit, pdf, prc
ISBN: 978-1-60370-585-1, 1-60370-585-6
Genre: Science Fiction
Age Range: 14 and up.
Saul Hornsby is the last magician living in Verusa. Thanks to a plot to destroy the plant where his father was killed, Saul is a wanted man. He has enough problems just hiding from police, and that's before Edward Audel, the most powerful man in Verusa, starts blackmailing him.
Forced into working for Audel, Saul begins searching for a lost family heirloom. The trail takes him under the city, into a dirty subterranean lair where Audel's runaway son, Toven, lives in hiding.
Soon Saul will discover his past, no matter how deeply buried, isn't dead, and that love can be found in the strangest of places. His love for Toven grows, even as he strives to find the truth behind his father's death, and soon Saul, Toven and a shadowy figure known as the Tenth Man join forces to break free of Audel's influence and reclaim their lives.
Sample
The thing—a perfectly still, grayish lump in a cardboard box—resembled nothing so much as a boiled pudding. Fifteen was ridiculous, but seventeen was an outrage. There was no way the pet store clerk was going to get twenty out of him.
He waited, hand out, because change should have been coming.
The clerk shut the cash drawer with her hip. She turned her great, bespectacled eyes on him and raised an eyebrow in the direction of his upturned palm. “That’s the last one I have,” she said. “In Italy they sell them for $5.90 per pound. You got a steal.”
Holding his palm out with the thing sitting immobile in the complimentary cardboard box, Saul began to feel embarrassed. “It would seem,” Saul mumbled and put his hand back in his pocket.
The clerk smiled. “So, you’re just starting out then?”
Just starting out? What an insult. Saul wanted to tell her that he was a professional and had been for years. He wanted to say this was, in fact, his second familiar, but then would come all those inevitable, uncomfortable questions that people always asked. What happened to the first one? What were you doing in the Janion, anyway?
“Just starting? No, I’ve been at it for a while.” He patted the greasy, fleshy lump in the box and his hand came away smelling like cabbage.
“Oh yeah?”
Saul dug a crumpled business card out of his pocket, smoothed the corner, and offered it to the clerk.
“Hornsby Magic. Locate Lost Items—Reasonable Rates. Oh.” She looked him over again, squinting through her thick, black-rimmed glasses. “Are you taking new clients? Because I’ve lost something and I really need it back, and all the other psychics are sort of creepy.”
He laughed. The other psychics are sort of frauds, he thought. “Sure, I can take on a new client.”
He retrieved the day planner from his coat pocket. “There’s an opening at 5:30 tomorrow, if you want it.”
“Perfect. How much?”
He considered his usual rates, and then he inflated them. “Twenty would do.”
