The Dan Provocations Series

Tom, Two-Dan $mith (sic) thought his life couldn't get any worse, and then a gorgeous woman turns up at his door and drags him off on a whirlwind quest to sort out the organisation responsible for all the troubles in the galaxy.   Sadly, what glitters is nothing more than polished coal. His guide has another agenda; he is cannon-fodder. Oblivious and taken in by her charms, he follows her schemes, surviving by sheer luck and circumstance only as he meets a bizarre collection of aliens, and then the girl of his dreams.   What awaits him at the very end of Time itself is a confluence of unimaginable universes and the controller of all Time and Space.   His existence is pivotal to the combined multiverse and this is only the beginning of a continued flight from the Cyclic Imperative, the law which states that everyone should return to their origins in Time and Space. For his new love, he refuses to, and the entire universe is now out to get him.

Rescued from a dying planet, Barry Saint-Albans, the second-greatest detective in all the universes, is given a simple task: track down the missing son of the captain of a belligerent star ship that is threatening the Inn of the Sixth Dan on the very edge of uncharted space. Unfortunately, said son has joined a procession of pilgrims heading off into the unknown in search of peace, answers to why we are all here, and where we came from before everything went pear-shaped. None have ever returned to tell. Barry is tasked with finding out what has happened to the missing travellers, with a restricted time frame and instructions to bring back the missing son alive, dead or in gaseous form, before the inn is destroyed. The trail takes him into a preposterously populated unknown, through a frontier settlement, a tax haven for despots and oligarchs, an exile planet for road planners and a Stone Age society run by an old enemy (or at least one of his cousins). The ultimate answers are revealed, but will they be enough to prevent Barry meeting the same fate as the pilgrims, and the Inn ceasing to be, and how does this all fit in with the killing of the ruling family in a devastated star system back home?

The universe has gone mad - money, laws, personal pronouns and parking restrictions all cancelled. Barry Saint-Albans, the second greatest detective in all the universes, has been tasked with solving a murder. All relatively easy if you have a time machine, but not such a good idea if this belongs to someone else, especially if it's holding up the roof of her hut. The murder was all a setup. Now as the main suspect, Barry already knows too much (he does have a massive database). Help could come from an android he created, but he mislaid her data store in a carrier bag somewhere, and she is not best pleased. And then there is the psychotic Kara-Tay, who is being held hostage by the brain of a former lover. He wants his body back and has set his missing heart on stealing Barry's. They all want to have a word with the detective, and that word seems to be 'Die'. And why? Barry and his soulmate, Gemma, are the first of a new race of sentient human/synthetic hybrids who have broken their programming. Everybody wants a piece.   Artificial Intelligence has become Real Intelligence.