The Killing Machine
About this audiobook
Five intergalactic criminal masterminds raid the tranquil world of Mount Pleasant, leaving behind only ruin and slaughter—and the orphaned child Kirth Gersen, who comes to manhood swearing to take bloody revenge. Now Gersen roams the galaxy, bringing vengeance to the Demon Princes one by one, in Jack Vance’s classic series of hardboiled space opera.
Someone is stealing the children of the galaxy’s elite, and Kirth Gersen suspects that the kidnapper is Kokor Hekkus—second of the Demon Princes. Deciphering a complex pattern of clues and coincidences, Gersen tracks his quarry to a barbaric world, where Hekkus is protected by an invincible war machine. To confront Hekkus, Gersen must resort to a desperate plan.
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About the author
Jack Vance (1916–2013) published his first story, “The World-Thinker,” in 1945 and went on to write over sixty books. Best known as a science fiction and fantasy writer, Vance has won several awards in those genres, including the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement and a number of Hugo Awards. He also tried his hand at writing murder mysteries, a small dozen of which were published under his full name of John Holbrook Vance. In 1997, he was named a SFWA Grand Master. A 2009 profile in the New York Times Magazine described Vance as “one of American literature’s most distinctive and undervalued voices.”
Stefan Rudnicki is a Grammy-winning audiobook producer and an award-winning narrator who has won several Audie Awards and been named one of AudioFile’s Golden Voices. A longtime fan of Weird fiction, and of Robert W. Chambers in particular, Stefan’s dramatic adaptation of The King in Yellow received the Madolin Cervantes Award from the Society of Stage Directors & Choreographers and was staged by him at the Donnell Library Center in New York City.
