The City of Cries

Major Bhaajan returns to the desolate, sand-swept world of her rough-edged childhood because her detective skills have earned her a lucrative assignment: find a runaway son of the ruling dynasty.

Forays into Raylicon's Underworld, treachery, encounters with gangsters and an old flame are just some of the challenges facing Major Bhaajan in pursuit of the missing aristocrat.

The "City of Cries" novella is included in the 2011 WindyCon collection of Catherine Asaro's writings called AURORA IN FOUR VOICES.

Catherine Asaro is a Nebula Award winner for her novel The Quantum Rose, part of her popular Skolian Empire series, and the novella "The Spacetime Pool." Her novels have three times been named the best science fiction novel of the year by Romantic Times Book Club. She has won numerous other awards, including the Analog Readers Poll award, the Homer, and the Sapphire award. She has an M.A. in physics, and a Ph.D. in chemical physics, both from Harvard, and has done research at the University of Toronto, The Max Planck Institute, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

A former ballet and jazz dancer, she founded the Mainly Jazz Dance program at Harvard and danced on both the west and east coasts. Her previous books for Baen were Sunrise Alley, its sequel, Alpha, and two novels in her Skolian Empire series, The Ruby Dice and Diamond Star. For Diamond Star, she also cut a CD of the same name with the rock band Point Valid, which offers a soundtrack to the book. She continues to compose and perform, and appears in concert at science fiction cons.