Vessel

by Darren R. Hawkins

Aboard the military-commercial deep space vessel, Paraclete, a murder has been committed – the ritualistic sacrifice of a young child...and the decadently wealthy Whiston family who had been charged with the boy's safety wants to know why, both quickly and discreetly.

Ray Marlowe, a deep cover security agent tasked to Paraclete to uncover a terrorist revolutionary cell, considers himself anything but discreet. But as he is inexorably drawn into the investigation, the crime is not merely heinous, it’s personal, bearing a disturbing resemblance to events he witnessed as a combat Marine on the New Mesopotamian battlefields of events too similar to be mere coincidence, and which hint at the return of an ancient and malevolent force.

Now, in a far flung future, the past has returned.

Vessel is a novel of hard boiled pseudo-Lovecraftian space noir with squishy (and doomed, of course) romantic bits.

494 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 19, 2013

About the author

Darren Hawkins lives in Owen County, Indiana with his wife and three sons. He purchased a B.A. in English from Indiana University so he could work in a field completely unrelated to his degree. When not writing science fiction, he divides his time between gainful employment with his alma mater as a database analyst and SQR developer and the Front Office Baseball League, where he has successfully been running his fantasy baseball team into the ground since 2002. He is disturbed by how pleasant it is to discuss himself in the third person.