Shape-shifting and gender-switching alien Shakespeare/Tiva is an undercover cop who dances to resolve personal conflict. Her unwitting partner is fifteen-year-old Alex Marsh. Together, they try to save other worlds from intergalactic Kiaian outlaws who have come to Earth to get weapons they can’t get anywhere else. The Kiaians have brought with them an astonishing assortment of bloodthirsty killers. But Tiva and her supervisors have a plan … A vacation in Southern France. Yet plans are made to fail. How can Tiva and Alex stay undercover and stay alive long enough to save countless human and alien lives while the alien villains, their intergalactic monsters, and their human drug lord partners swarm the French coast?

One of the protagonists is a shape-shifting alien who changes gender. Their people have families with several parents and no gender roles.

Award-winning novelist Gillian Bradshaw’s classic fantasy-history tale of Egypt and Nubia, now in one volume. Teen fisherman Prahotep is nicknamed “bad-luck” because everything he touches turns to disaster. When his father dies, he sets off to Thebes to improve his fate, but soon winds up on a dangerous work crew, cutting stone for an evil magician. There he befriends a dying tomb-robber who tells him of unimaginable riches—and how to find them. Prahotep escapes the work crew but instead of finding the riches, he finds Lady Hathor, a proud, irritable dragon. Meanwhile, to the south, in Nubia, the princess Kandaki’s family is murdered by a usurper. Kandaki refuses the usurper’s offer of marriage, and is sent north to be offered as a sacrifice to a “swamp dragon.”

Egyptian and Nubian characters