Young Jaf Daskal’s days and nights living on the streets of Durary come to an end when he and his dog are caught stealing food and chased back to his ramshackle hovel by angry teens. His future looks bleak when he’s rescued by Rabbara, the community fixer and matriarch, and adopted into her home.

Secure for the first time he finds friends, love, and a job working for the local boss. Jaf uses his skills at blending in, charming strangers and keeping his mouth shut to rise in the boss’ organization. When political campaigns start up the boss uses Jaf’s skills to survey the public attitudes, and shape them in the preferred way.

A job, a career, and a girlfriend – Jaf’s future looks solid, his life is sweet. Everything his early years had denied him was finally his, and he enjoys it too thoroughly. Soon he finds himself in serious trouble, more serious than he could have imagined.

When he realizes his punishment might fall on others he makes a mad dash to save what he can of his steampunk world and his star-cross’d heart.

This is the immediate sequel to ‘Star-Cross’d’.

Having learnt his lesson, his sponsors still see lots of potential in him. Without options he takes them up on their offer to attend the Imperial Secret Service Academy.

Suddenly finding himself in a world where intrigue and lying are taught, he’s bewildered by the small-scale political scheming practiced by his fellow students. He finds himself the victim of a prank, and then blamed for a terrible accident.

Still, his skills at being so unremarkable as to achieve invisibility, his ingenuous story-telling, and his inability to remain honest mark him as a future star in the Secret Service – and he’s tutored and counseled in secret by the staff.

Finally there’s a plot so monstrous, with a reward so sweet, that Jaf succumbs and agrees to do something so big and daring that it will either make his career or end his life.

When Jaf Daskal betrays the sinister fellow who paid him to recover a mysterious ‘treasure,’ he feels like he’s being pursued by the Dragons of Vashtar as he and his little band are launched into a bizarre adventure of fraud, power, sex, drugs, and religion that culminates in a battle for freedom.

The Caliuga Set-Up is a steampunk adventure story that begins the saga of Jaf Daskal, an orphan brought up by a poor elderly woman on the afterthought town of Kipple. From her he learned some appreciation of universal feminine attributes; from his hardscrabble hometown he learned to adapt and fit in, how to be everybody’s friend, and how to bend ethics in order to survive.

His reputation gets him a job to recover a mysterious treasure in the desert of Mobahey. Once there he recruits some partners in crime and they head out on a treasure hunt. But in Jaf Daskal’s world nothing is pure or simple, and schemes and scams land them in the unknown land of Caliuga where Jaf’s friend is mistaken for the Emperor’s Inspector General.
This is the first-ever contact by the Emperor with his stranded people, and comforts, feasts and very-friendly Caliugans, each with an angle and eager to work a deal.

The Caliugans have mostly coexisted peacefully, but some recent arrivals are trying to consolidate and gain power over the others by forming a continental union and are coercing other colonies into joining. Jaf and his party are small-time crooks; it looks like this union is on a whole different scale.

It is into this vortex that Jaf and his crew are drawn. Fraud, confusion, intrigue, schemes and plots ensue as Jaf is sucked into the politics of Caliuga, and it all culminates with battles and bloodshed.

After five years searching, Basoolah the crime boss has found Jaf Daskal, and he wants revenge for the theft of a mystery treasure. In Jaf’s panicked escape he gets himself hired to learn what’s going on with the loose daughters of an old crime boss. Sounds great! Then the sex/mystic drug zoocaine shows up, and pandemonium is unleashed among the idle wealthy. Soon revolution bubbles, Jaf stirring.

Jaf Daskal is on the run. The criminal kingpin he stole a mysterious treasure from years ago has found Jaf and Jaf’s buddy Wanliet. Desperate, Jaf commits a horrible crime, allowing them to escape, but scarring Jaf’s soul. Looking for work, he’s found by a retired crime lord who is concerned about what his wayward daughters are up to.

During Jaf’s investigations he learns that the sexual/mystical drug he’d experimented with on the ‘lost continent’ of Caliuga had come to Landalla, his new home base. Knowing the power of zoocaine, Jaf is both tantalized and terrified. But how does all this fit in with the two young women?

Primal forces are unleashed, pandemonium threatens an empire, and Jaf struggles to extricate himself from the chains of heroic destiny.