A runner for a shady errand—and sometimes shifty smuggling—service finds an unexpected partner in his half-human, teenage half-brother! In the future, a decent job is hard to find, especially if you’re a hard-worn scoundrel with commitment issues. But there’s one position that’s always open—an errand runner. Jace is a lifelong solo act running miscellaneous tasks, often dangerous, and hardly legal, for the most questionable of clients. But when his thirteen-year-old half-human half brother comes to live with him, he’s got two mouths to feed and there’s only one way he knows how to put money on the table. Between evading the law, running from angry aliens, and jumping off skyscrapers, can Jace survive being a big brother? Navigating to the furthest depths of the solar system, the only thing weirder than the vastness of space is family. You can outrun monsters, but you can’t outrun duty! Collects Errand Boys #1–#5.

At the time the largest city in the world, Victorian London intrigued and appalled politicians, clergymen, novelists and social investigators. Dickens, Mayhew, Booth, Gissing and George Bernard Shaw, to name but a few, developed a morbid fascination with its sullied streets and the sensational gulf between London classes. Outcast London explores the London economy, in particular its vast numbers of casual and irregular day labourers and the artisans and seamstresses engaged in seasonal and workshop trades. This vast assemblage was volatile, subject to the ups and downs of the world economy, to the vagaries of the weather, and to the rise and fall of various trades. Its crises could cause panic in wealthy London. New forms of charity came into being as well as, eventually, an embryonic form of the twentieth century welfare state. At first sight, the London described in this book is wholly remote from the city encountered today. But developments in recent decades reveal that the types of irregular employment, poverty and inequality experienced by modern Londoners are not so distant from those familiar to their Victorian and Edwardian ancestors.