The Pinch Books in Order

The Pinch novels take place in a far future corridor of space where travel routes twist through a narrow, strategically vital region known as the Pinch. Here the planet Palace has grown into a political and commercial hub, layered with privilege, poverty, and pervasive networked technology.

In Palace Kerr and co author Mark Kreighbaum introduce a society where much of life depends on the Map, a vast cyberspace structure that stores knowledge and runs systems on which whole worlds rely. The Cyberguild that maintains the Map wields enormous quiet power, making its leaders prime targets for anyone who wants to break or remake the status quo.

The story centers on Arno, the son of the guild's Master, and Vida, a young woman sold into sensual slavery in the Pleasure Sect. Both are meant to be victims in a political game: a bitter Lep outcast has been hired to kill them as part of a larger plot, and factions within Palace's Government House are more concerned with consolidating control than with justice. Arno's discovery of dangerous anomalies in the Map and Vida's emerging psychic gifts force them into motion before their enemies can strike.

As Arno goes to ground in the city and Vida seeks a precarious refuge at the heart of power, readers see how different layers of Palace coexist and collide. High officials, data jockeys, sect adepts, and street level operators all depend on the same fragile infrastructure. The book balances high stakes action with questions about identity in a world where minds can interact with the Map as easily as with one another.

The second volume, The Eyes of God, written by Kreighbaum and set in the same universe, picks up unresolved threads from Palace. It follows the longer reach of the conspiracies hinted at in the first book and explores what happens when the tools meant to watch over the Pinch become objects of worship or fear in their own right. The focus moves outward from a single city toward the broader political and religious currents that shape the region.

Taken together, the Pinch books read as dense, idea rich science fiction that still makes room for character driven storytelling. The mix of high technology, altered states of consciousness, and very human ambition will appeal if you like your space futures messy, morally ambiguous, and full of unintended consequences.

This act is relatively compact compared to Deverry, but it shows another facet of Kerr's imagination: the ability to design believable systems and then let flawed, interesting people try to live inside them.