Dark Secret ... disclosed :-)

Latest update: September 3, 2024. New editions are out in hardback, trade paperback, and ebook formats. 

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I'm delighted to announce the publication of Dark Secret. This is my latest novel (number fourteen, if anyone is counting)—and an epic adventure with the very survival of humanity at stake.

Original (2016) cover

When the experimental ship Clermont is urgently recalled from a long-range test flight, neither Dana McElwain nor Blake Westford, its captain and crew, imagines that they are about to embark on a much more urgent voyage—or that this new mission will determine the fate of the human race.
A gamma-ray burst—the deadly beam of radiation spawned seven thousand years earlier in the death throes of doomed neutron stars—is about to wipe the Solar System clean of all life. Only the Clermont’s prototype long-range drive might carry anyone, and any of humanity’s legacy, to safety before that extinction.

And then what? Where beyond the Solar System is safe? What if the price of survival is to become less ... human?

Certainly I'm pleased with the early feedback:

You'll want to be somewhere else ...

"Gamma-ray bursters are a real, frightful danger, and Edward M. Lerner captures the awful truth of this in a quick, startling story that—I warn you!—will be hard to put down."
— Gregory Benford, coauthor of Bowl of Heaven

"Gripping. Impossible to put down."
— Jack McDevitt, author of The Devil's Eye 

"Dark Secret is a unique tale of catastrophe and survival on multiple levels, gripping and harrowing yet ultimately inspiring. Lerner shows what it might really be like to be forced from an out-of-control frying pan into a far worse fire, and how humanity might endure even if what the refugees bring with them is worse than what they find."
— Stanley Schmidt, author of Argonaut 

The Dark (one of 'em, anyway) of Dark Secret

"Leave it to Edward M. Lerner to take a notion, run with it, squeeze every ramification out of it, and put it altogether in an irresistible page-turner. Dark Secret is a crackerjack novel—hard science fiction at its best."
— Robert J. Sawyer, author of Quantum Night

"With Dark Secret Lerner has crafted a compelling tale of survival of the human race following the cataclysmic destruction of Earth. The story turns on the conflicts of personality, politics, conflicting theories of governance, and the nurture/nature conundrum and ends with an amazing and satisfying conclusion.

"Lerner handles his tale of power and relationships, friendship and loss, with sensitivity, bringing each principal character and their motivations to light while telling an entertaining story. A must read."
— Bud Sparhawk, author of Vixen

Curious? Intrigued? Check out the book on Amazon (2024 edition).

(Not feeling Amazonian? Other e-tailers -- more of 'em daily -- offer Dark Secret in print and/or additional ereader formats. And any brick-and-mortar bookseller will happily order copies of either print edition ... )