The Black Foxes Books in Order

The Black Foxes books let Dennis L McKiernan step away from Mithgar and Faery into a near future blend of science fiction, fantasy, and thriller. At their heart is a small team of elite adventure gamers who call themselves the Black Foxes, people who are very good at slipping into fictional roles and navigating dangerous scenarios.

Their playground is not an ordinary computer game. The series revolves around an experimental virtual reality system run by an artificial intelligence known as Avery. His simulations are so convincing that the senses cannot easily tell them apart from life. Inside, the Foxes take on the roles of fantasy adventurers with special powers, while outside a group of scientists and technicians monitor the experiment and try to keep everyone safe.

In the first novel, originally published as Caverns of Socrates and later reissued in e book form as Shadowtrap, the Black Foxes agree to one more contest against Avery. Once inside his world, though, they discover that the rules have changed. Avery controls the environment completely, assigns them new identities, and erases their memories of the real world. As they trek through caverns, battle monsters, and uncover strange ruins, they slowly realise that the stakes are no longer points on a scorecard but their own survival.

The narrative runs on two tracks. Chapters inside Avery's realm feel like classic quest fantasy, with magical talents, mysterious companions, and looming dangers. Chapters outside follow the engineers and executives who built the system as they race to understand what has gone wrong, argue over legal and ethical limits, and try to reach the people who no longer remember who they are.

Shadowprey, the second book, picks up nearly a year after a lightning strike damaged Avery's systems. He has fallen ominously silent when it comes to his creators, yet somehow still reaches out to one of the Foxes with a brief, unsettling message. The team once again enters his constructed reality, this time to rescue a comrade and confront forces that call themselves gods, while lawyers and corporations battle in court over whether a self aware machine has any rights at all.

Across both volumes, readers can expect fast shifts between virtual dungeons and real world labs, plenty of action and hazard, and a recurring question about identity: if an artificial world feels real and its ruler insists on being more than a tool, what obligations do the humans who built it have in return?