Dwarves in Space Series

Time's unraveling across the galaxy and the only hope are two people who'd rather kill each other than work together. Drake Bane is a low-class smuggler and general grit in the galaxy's wheels of progress. He finds himself on the wrong side of a goblin mob boss and gets the choice to either steal an ancient relic or test space decompression up close. When his ship's impounded as collateral he's left to sneak his way onto a ship without bothering to get to know the captain or its cast of interesting characters. Too bad or he'd have skipped right past and saved himself a major headache. Captain Variel Tuffman's got her own secrets which she's not about to share with a smuggler that lied his way onto her ship. All she wants is to ditch the guy before the couple on her ship who think they're on a cruise vacation catch on. It all goes wibbly wobbly when an ancient artifact impales itself onto her hand and she can't get it off. The crew is sent careening across the galaxy on the run from a bunch of species' militaries and the dwarven antiquities board. At the heart of it all is a hole in the galaxy that no one's ever seen before or can explain and it's getting bigger. When the captain starts speaking gibberish and snaps in and out of comas, their only hope may be the relic jammed in her hand.

Thousands of years after the jewelry's destroyed, the sword reforged, the dragon ridden, and the indecipherable prophecy translated into a recipe for sugared biscuits, the dwarves turned to that final frontier: space. And along came the elves, orcs, gnomes, trolls, ogres, and those vermin-like upstarts, humans. Dwarves in Space is Tolkien merged with Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in a horrific transporter accident. The Elation-Cru is not the flashiest ship, nor the newest, or even has all of its bolts attached; but she can fly. Well, sort of wade through space, and that's when all the parts are working. She supports a sugar addicted dwarven pilot, an elven engineer, an orcish doctor, a silent djinn, and the lone human trying to hold the entire thing together with duct tape. Variel, the captain, has been hiding from a secret for the past five years and time's finally run out. When she goes against her common sense and fights to save her onboard assassin/renter from a job gone sour, she finds herself before an ex-colleague that knew her in her previous life as the Knight of the realm. The entire ship is sent on a mad dash across the universe -- from a decaying space station, home to the wackiest species the galaxy has to offer, down to the Orc homeworld, which wouldn't be so bad if Variel hadn't spent most of her previous life fighting in the war against them. Chances of survival are nil and slipping fast.

Family, it's a kick in the teeth on every planet. Five years have passed since Variel changed her name, her face, and her credit rating in order to leave the Knights. After kicking Sovann, the knight who came after her ship, out the airlock, she thought she was free of her past.  Unfortunately, she forgot to take care of that pesky husband problem. Thanks to legal finagling, he's tracked her down and has her ship and crew on lockdown unless she plays ball, but all Variel wants to do is knock his teeth up into his brain. The Elation-Cru are on a mad dash across the galaxy to secure enough unicorn (the drug, not the horse - though consuming it will cause you to grow a horn and excrete rainbows) to pay off her husband and unlock the ship before it explodes. Drug dealing was the last thing Variel wanted to get pulled into, but Marek always brought the worst out in her. If he keeps pushing it, he's going to see why she was a feared Knight of the Crest Empire. All the characters are back; Ferra the elven engineer, Orn the sarcastic dwarven pilot, Monde the orc doctor, Brena the loopy bard, Taliesin the not-brooding assassin, and WEST. Can't go anywhere without WEST, their not-quite-sane artificial intelligence, it would set the toaster on fire in protest.

Ever wanted your sci-fi and fantasy mashed together into an idiosyncratic harmony? Welcome to Dwarves in Space, a series that's full of dwarves loving tacos, elven assassins climbing through air ducts, orcs wearing tasteful sweater vests, and a Captain trying to keep them all from setting the ship on fire. In Free Radicals, Variel, Orn, Taliesin, and the rest of the Elation crew are back. An attempt to spend a relaxing day on a space station for non-corporeals backfires when terrorists attack. Now it's up to the ex-Knight, assassin, elven engineer, orc doctor, and whatever Orn is to save the day. Each book is stand alone in the series, but they all fit together like a dysfunctional puzzle. This is why we can't have nice space stations.