Author:
Corey McCullough is an independent copy editor, proofreader, ghostwriter, and author. He lives in western Pennsylvania with his amazing wife Vanessa and their two beautiful daughters. His favorite pastimes are reading, writing, playing video games, spending time with his best friend (Vanessa), and, most of all, being a dad.

Night lasts for days on the planet Jannix, and when the sun goes down over a city brimming with corruption and organized crime, no one can be certain they will see another dawn. Retired police detective Jack Tarelli has turned to the bottle to cope with these long nights ever since the unsolved murder of his wife, but when he's called to the home of an enigmatic starship tycoon just hours after a high-profile homicide, he knows his longest night yet has just begun.

Led on a chase deep into the shadows of a city that never wakes, the hard-nosed and uncompromising Jack finds himself on the trail of a killer whose true motives shrouded. Was it revenge for an interplanetary business deal gone wrong? Or something more personal?

As connections to Jack's own bloody past rise to the surface, it becomes clear that this is more than a search for answers. It's a race against time. And the body count is going to rise long before the sun.

A Knife in the Dark is a gritty tech noir story combining elements of "used future" science fiction and film noir in a fast-paced, futuristic thriller.

A Knife in the Dark

My ribs feel like they're about to pop beneath the machine-man's weight, but my hands are free at my sides. As Bot-Nathan winds up for the death strike, I draw the particle pistol strapped to my calf.


I fire twice before he can react. Two red-hot blasts of concentrated radiation streak into him. The first hits his wrist and burns straight through it. I see the glint of the knife pinwheeling through the air, leaving him brandishing nothing but a handless forearm. The second blast burns a hole through his neck.


He kicks my weapon-hand before I can fire a third shot, and it's like getting hit with a sledgehammer. As the pistol flies from my grasp, I'm shouting in agony. He's just broken the fingers of my good hand. All of them. At once.


He bends down to grab me, but his head flops unnaturally to the side. The damaged half of his neck is a crater of glowing, superheated metal. He takes an awkward step, like a man fighting dizziness, and his head hangs like a flower on a broken stalk.


Chapter 36: Jack the Knife