Jade Darcy and the Affair of Honor

For the past five years, Jade Darcy has not seen another human being. A computer-augmented mercenary, she lives on the planet Cablans, a stopover point for traders from hundreds of worlds -- and a good place to meet customers who need the services of a skilled warrior. She turns down what she considers a suicide assignment: traveling to an enslaved world to assassinate one of its military leaders. But then she learns there's another human being on Cablans -- a human being with the potential to expose Jade's mysterious past, with possibly fatal results. All of a sudden, a suicide mission looks positively appetizing.... This is the first published volume in the Rehumanization of Jade Darcy series. Award-winning science fiction author Spider Robinson says: "A legend returns. Long before there were any buffed Xenas or xenophobic Buffies in the pantheon of fighting females, there existed a remarkable woman warrior named Jade Darcy: a computer-assisted mercenary so formidable and so smart that the Dark Angel, Friday and the Bionic Woman together would have hesitated to piss her off--yet so emotionally mixed up that she broke your heart. Even better: unlike any of those ladies just named, this jade's adventures were most definitely not rated PG. Indeed it was her creators' deep insight into female sexuality and spirituality, as much as their mastery of action scenes, that gave Jade Darcy an uncommon plausibility, a realness, so often missing in other woman-warrior fictions. The restoration to print of the two volumes of the Rehumanization of Jade Darcy series is long overdue, and most welcome; you'll have to go a long way to find a more addictive heroine.