The Queen's Daemon

T'aafhal Legacy #2

by Doug L. Hoffman

The Peggy Sue has gone farther away from Earth than any human built ship, “almost one hundred light-years as the crow flies,” as Captain Billy Ray Vincent observed. After stopping to fill up on deuterium at an icy moon circling an unnamed planet of an insignificant remnant of a dead star, the Captain decides to head back to Earth and home. On they way the pass through Alpha Phoenicis, a binary star system in the constellation of the phoenix. There the receive a signal that could only have come from an artifact of the T'aafhal, the mysterious vanished alien race whose actions thrust humanity onto the galactic stage. They immediately change course for the signal's point of origin—a small planet orbiting a red dwarf that is the companion star to the system's main orange giant. What they don't know is that they are about to find themselves in the midst of an interplanetary invasion, and an ambush by an undetectable Dark Lord ship that strands Mizuki on the planet's surface. A raging battle for succession among the natives is complicated by meddling “daemons” from another planet in the system. Can the Captain and crew repair the Peggy Sue, overcome the treacherous Dark Lords and rescue Mizuki? Will the princess that befriends Mizuki survive to become queen? Will Mizuki live to become The Queen's Daemon?

372 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 2015

About the author

Doug L. Hoffman has worked professionally as a mathematician, a computer programmer, an engineer, a computer salesman, a scientist, and a college professor. Hoffman earned a BS in Applied Mathematics, from the Florida Institute of Technology. He has performed hydro-acoustic work for the U.S. Navy, and helped develop environmental models for the Saudi Arabian government. In the 1990s, he earned a Masters degree and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There he did research in Molecular Dynamics Simulations and helped develop high-speed comparison methods for RNA, DNA, and protein sequences. Since 2000, he has been working in industry as a Computer Scientist for a major information processing company. Dr. Hoffman has continued to teach at Hendrix College and the University of Central Arkansas. He is currently working on M'tak Ks'fek, the third book in the T'aafhal Inheritance trilogy.

Reviews

[Doug Hoffman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think it's fantastic, but then, I wrote it. I will be available on Amazon July 1, 2015, in paperback and Kindle ebook.

[John Morrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

I won this book through the giveaways. The Queen's Daemon is an awesome sci-fi novel. Great story the will keep you reading wanting more.