Devouring Light

Mischievous Mercurio guards the planet Mercury - his sacred charge - with quirky devotion. He loves the oddball chunk of rock, with its illusion of retrograde motion and its out-of-sync orbit and spin.

Almost as much as he loves playing pranks.

But when Earth's guardian Gaia bids Mercurio to organize a circus act for Sol's birthday celebration, the joke's on him.

While Mercurio wangles his way around the captious refusals of his would-be stilt-walkers and clowns - "No, no, and no!" - the somber guardian of Pluto plots a darker scheme.

With the subtle delight, clever misdirection, and teasing wordplay that Mercurio himself enjoys, J.M.Ney-Grimm tells a tale of steeply rising stakes in a clockwork solar system ruled by the gods of ancient Rome.