David Gunn

Easton Press David Gunn books

Death's Head Maximum Offense - Signed First Edition of Science Fiction - 2008

 

Author David Gunn

David Gunn is known for his work in the science fiction genre. He is a pseudonymous British writer, and his Birth name is Thomas L. Strickland. He is best known for his Death's Head series, a military science fiction series featuring the protagonist Sven Tveskoeg. The series gained popularity for its fast-paced action, gritty atmosphere, and the characterization of its main character. Gunn's novels in the Death's Head series include Death's Head, Maximum Offense, and Day of the Damned. The books have been praised for their engaging narrative and inventive world-building within the science fiction genre.

 

Death's Head Maximum Offense - Death's Head Series Book 2

With Death’s Head, David Gunn rocketed onto the scene in the most explosive and entertaining science fiction debut since Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon. Now Gunn is back–and so is Sven Tveskoeg: antisocial, antihero, anti-you-name-it, a one-man killing spree whose best friend is an intelligent handgun with a bad attitude and whose worst enemy is, well, just about everybody else.

And if Sven weren’t dangerous enough already, add in the lethal alien parasite that resides in his throat . . . and is capable of bending space and time. Then there’s the fact that Sven’s genetic makeup is only 98.2 percent human, the rest being undetermined but possibly contributing to his enhanced healing abilities, superior strength, unusual agility, and notable sociopathic tendencies. The result is one seriously badass soldier with a hair-trigger temper and a chip on his shoulder the size of a small moon. These are qualities that would doom a man to prison or worse in any decent society.

Luckily, Sven doesn’t live in a decent society. He lives in the empire of OctoV, a tyrant who is part machine, part boy, part god, and all evil. Sven’s qualities have brought him to OctoV’s personal attention and earned him a lieutenant’s commission in the Death’s Head, the elite corps of assassins and enforcers whose purpose in life is to kill and die for the greater glory of OctoV.

Sven’s new assignment? Lead his ragtag band of Death’s Head rejects–the Aux, short for auxiliaries–to the artificial world of Hekati. It seems that a citizen of the United Free, an empire not only vaster than OctoV’s but far more technologically advanced, has gone missing there. Now it’s up to Sven to rescue the poor soul.

But Hekati turns out to be a vicious den of backstabbing and betrayal, where nothing and no one can be trusted, least of all the greenhorn colonel put in charge of the mission at the last moment. It looks like somebody wants Sven Tveskoeg dead.

So what else is new?

About Death's Head

Set in a chillingly realistic far-future world, and featuring a gritty antihero even more frightening than the evil empire he serves as soldier and assassin, Death’s Head is sure to be one of the most talked-about novels of the year. David Gunn is loaded–and he shoots to kill.

At the top of the galactic pecking order is the United Free, a civilization of awe-inspiring technological prowess so far in advance of other space-faring powers as to seem untouchable gods. Most of the known universe has fallen under their inscrutable sway. The rest is squabbled over by two one ruled with an iron fist by OctoV, a tyrant who appears to his followers as a teenage boy but is in reality something very different, the other administered by the Uplifted, bizarre machine like intelligences, and their no-longer-quite-human servants, cyborgs known as the Enlightened.

Sven Tveskoeg, an ex-sergeant demoted for insubordination and sentenced to death, is a vicious killer with a stubborn streak of loyalty. Sven possesses a fierce if untutored intelligence and a genetic makeup that is 98.2 percent human and 1.8 percent . . . something else. Perhaps that “something else” explains how quickly he heals from even the worst injuries or how he can communicate telepathically with the ferox, fearsome alien savages whose natural fighting abilities regularly outperform the advanced technology of their human enemies. Perhaps it is these unique abilities that bring Sven to the attention of OctoV.

Drafted into the Death’s Head, the elite enforcers of OctoV’s imperial will, Sven is given a new lease on life. Armed with a SIG diabolo–an intelligent gun–and an illegal symbiont called a kyp, Sven is sent to a faraway planet, the latest battleground between the Uplifted and OctoV. There he finds himself in the midst of a military disaster, one that will take all his courage–and all his firepower–to survive.

But an even deadlier struggle is taking place, a struggle that will draw the attention of the United Free. Sven knows he is a pawn, and pawns have a bad habit of being sacrificed.

But Sven is nobody’s sacrifice. And even a pawn can checkmate a king.