Merchant Princes – serie

The Bloodline Feud by Charles Stross includes The Family Trade and The Hidden Family - the first two instalments of The Merchant Princes series combined in one volume.Miriam Beckstein is a successful reporter for a hi-tech magazine. So when she discovers a huge money-laundering scam, she thinks she's hit the big time. But when she takes it to her editor, not only is she fired, but she starts to receive death threats. And that's just the beginning.To distract her furious daughter, Miriam's adoptive mother unearths mementos from her real mother, murdered when she was an infant. But these reveal a secret that will ultimately throw entire governments into disarray. For what Miriam thinks is a simple locket has the power to fling her into an alternate timeline. In this less-developed world, knights on horseback wield automatic weapons, and world-skipping assassins lurk - all on the other side of our reality. Here, her true family runs a criminal empire - and they want her back. But Miriam has other plans.Following The Bloodline Feud are two further omnibus volumes, The Traders' War and The Revolution Trade.

The Traders' War by Charles Stross includes The Clan Corporate and The Merchants' War, the third and fourth instalments in the spellbinding The Merchant Princes series combined into one volume.The journalistic instinct runs deep – and comes with a fatality warning.Miriam was an ambitious business journalist in Boston. Until she was fired – then discovered, to her shock, that her lost family comes from an alternate reality. And although some of them are trying to kill her, she won't stop digging up secrets. Now that she knows she's inherited the family ability to walk between worlds, there's a new culture to explore. Her alternate home seems located around the Middle Ages, making her world-hopping relatives top dogs when it comes to 'importing' guns and other gadgets from modern-day America. Payment flows from their services to US drug rings – after all, world-skipping drug runners make great traffickers. In a land where women are property, she struggles to remain independent. Yet her outsider ways won't be tolerated, and a highly political arranged marriage is being brokered behind her back. If she can stay alive for long enough to protest. The Traders' War is preceded by The Bloodline Feud omnibus, and followed with the final volume, The Revolution Trade.

The Revolution Trade by Charles Stross includes The Revolution Business and The Trade of Queens - the final two instalments of the spellbinding The Merchant Princes series combined in one volume.For one ex-journalist, the nightmare has just begun . . .Miriam Beckstein has said goodbye to her comfort zone. The transition from journalist to captive in an alternative timeline was challenging to say the least. As was discovering her long-lost family, the Clan, were world-skipping assassins. Now civil war rages in her adopted home, she's pregnant with the heir to their throne and a splinter-group want her on their side of a desperate power struggle. But as a leader or figurehead?Meanwhile, unknown to the Clan, the US government is on to them and preparing to exploit this knowledge. But it hadn't foreseen a dissident Clan faction carrying nuclear devices between worlds - with the US President in their sights. The War on Terror is about to go transdimensional. But Mike Fleming, CIA agent, knows the most terrifying secret of all. His government's true intentions.Preceding The Revolution Trade are two previous omnibus volumes, The Bloodline Feud and The Traders' War.