Once Dead: An Author's Note on the Book That Opens the Rho Agenda

Hello, friends,

I've been wanting to walk you through the Rho Agenda novels, one book at a time, and to do it without spoiling the turns that should take you by surprise. I want to start where I recommend the story itself starts: with Once Dead, Book One of The Rho Agenda Inception, which came out in 2014.

An assassin dies in Calcutta. He does not stay dead.

That is how this book begins, and I still think it is the right door for a lot of you. Once Dead is not a first-contact story that starts in a laboratory. It is a spy thriller with a science-fiction fuse. It opens the Rho universe from the back alley, not the lab.

If you have already read The Second Ship, you have met Jack “the Ripper” Gregory and his partner, Janet Price, partway through that novel. They became so integral to the story that I decided to write three prequel novels — the Inception trilogy — to show the events that propelled them into those roles. Once Dead is the first of the three.

I chose to begin with Jack's story because it reveals what eventually drives Jack and Janet to become key characters in the entire Rho Agenda series.

Jack is an ex-CIA assassin, and when the book opens, even that life is ending. He bleeds out in a Calcutta slum. On an operating table, he is about to die. Then he wakes, convinced an alien mind has taken root in him. The stakes are as stark as they sound. Jack, once the CIA's top assassin, has no cards left. An alien entity has other plans for him. If he is willing to act as a human host for this dark figure, he lives. Jack takes the deal.

I will not tell you more about that bargain than the book itself puts on the table at the start. It is not a gift. He comes back sharing his mind with an alien entity coupled to mankind's ultimate destiny, and he has accepted terms he does not yet understand. The questions start immediately, and they do not let him go.

A year later, the man who should have died on that table is internationally known as The Ripper, fixer for hire. The work belongs to the shadows of a globe-spanning thriller. Success in that world does not bring him peace. He suffers strange premonitions and compulsions. He is no longer the man he once was, and he knows it. He fights to regain his self-control even as he finds himself drawn, again and again, toward dire, world-shattering events.

What destiny does this alien mind foresee? Why has it chosen him? The survival of the human race may ultimately hinge on Jack finding the answers. Those are the questions I want you to carry into the book. I will not answer them here.

One of my favorite moments in this book is introducing Captain Steve Cole. Although Cole captains a U.S. Navy ship, I patterned him after an old Army buddy of mine who commanded alongside me in the Air Defense Artillery.

People sometimes ask me whether the tradecraft and the science in these books are made up out of thin air. They aren't. I graduated from West Point in 1979, qualified as a U.S. Army Ranger, and served as an Army officer. I earned a master's in physics from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1989 and did my thesis work at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Later I was a research associate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. I retired in 2013 to write full-time. I try to let that sit quietly in the story, not turn it into a lecture.

Where it fits in the Rho Agenda

Once Dead is Book One of The Rho Agenda Inception. Dead Wrong and Dead Shift complete that spy-thriller trilogy. Together they follow Jack and Janet Price — a CIA assassin and the partner who can keep up with him — and open the Rho universe from the shadows.

If you want every knife in the drawer, the order I recommend is this: the Inception trilogy, then the original Rho Agenda trilogy that begins with The Second Ship, then Assimilation (The Kasari Nexus, The Altreian Enigma, The Meridian Ascent), then Singularity, which opens with The Ripper's Son.

There is more than one correct door. The spy-thrillers explain who Jack Gregory is before the crashed ships. You can also drop into The Second Ship and never look back. Once Dead is the spy door: the place to begin if you want the assassin's story first, and the book that sets the stage for The Rho Agenda.

So here is my advice. If you're a fan of both spy thrillers and science fiction, start with Once Dead. If you're primarily a science-fiction fan, start with The Second Ship.

If you would like to start there, you can find Once Dead at thesecondship.net/books/once-dead.

Richard