Rehabilitation

By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

The man who calls himself Matt Sturtz only connects with other human beings at Christmas.  He takes a job as a mall Santa, and marvels that no one checks his resume, or his identification for that matter. But this year, something goes wrong. Something he won't stand for.  Something he must stop.  No matter how much it costs him.  No matter what goes wrong.

Rusch is a great storyteller.

—Romantic Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: WMG Publishing
• Release date: Aug 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386972501

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

New York Times bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. She publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov's Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award.   

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Rehabilitation

REHABILITATION

KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH

WMG Publishing Inc.

CONTENTS

Rehabilitation

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About the Author

REHABILITATION

This Christmas was different. For the first time in fifteen years, he had a choice of jobs. Help Wanted signs littered Portland. From restaurants to boutiques, from offices to museums, the red signs with the outlined white lettering beckoned from every window.

But Matt took the job he had taken every year since he started wandering. It still shocked him how quickly the malls hired their Santas, how little time these places, which entrusted other people’s children to big men with appealing laughs, spent on researching their employees’ backgrounds. When he had started in 1984, barely twenty and hardly large enough to play Santa, computers were rare things, personal data hard to trace. But it wasn’t now, and lawsuits were more common. Sometimes he wondered how many of his colleagues in their red suits with fake white fur trim had records, and how many of them used the information they got from a tyke in ways that would have made the real Santa leave coal in their stockings.

He liked playing Santa; it was the only time he felt as if he had worth. Every year, he heard from the mall manager that he was the best Santa the mall had ever had, and every year he promised to return the next, and every year, he was somewhere else, with a different name, and a different story. It used to be that he would arrive in his new