Aphy Ray Books

I work on a bunch of books at the same time. Some of them are pretty close to done, so here’s what’s in the pipeline.

I also have a newsletter you can subscribe to if you want to keep your finger on the pulse.

These are soft dates.

The Hunter’s Elegy

(Early 2025)

Sci-fi / Occultism / Murder Mystery / Police Cover-up / Deadname Ghosts

A murder mystery in a far-future world where the living are haunted by ghosts and deadnames, and the practice of the occult is heavily regulated by a shadowy federal agency.

Starring Private Detective Hunt Cheroneau, name resolution expert and junior partner of Vidal Detective Works. They’re really good at getting into things they’re not supposed to – including murder cases and police cover-ups.

Begrudgingly narrated by forcibly-retired amateur documentarian Reese Keyes, who was really hoping to spend the rest of his life serving coffee in random office gigs until Hunt hired him on to take notes on their latest case. For a note-taking gig, he ends up with a lot more blood on his hands than he ever wanted to see there again.

Diodes Go One Way

(Late 2026)

Robot / Romance / Cosmic Horror / Allocomp Asexuality

A romance between a robot and her mechanic, set in an alternate future where massive space wyrms have swarmed the Earth and occasionally tumble out of orbit, pocking the land with massive craters filled with rubble, deadly miasma, and their extremely valuable corpses.

Chloe is an old humanoid service unit who was left behind on her owner’s farm after one of the wyrms crashed nearby and corroded everything in sight with the rain of its blood. She gets rescued and restored from her horrible disfigurement by Hydrangea Cooper, a freelance mechanic who makes a living doing whatever random repairs she can scam out of whatever wyrmfall salvage operations will have her.

Hydrangea loves Chloe dearly, and she loves nothing more than getting her hands dirty prying her open and doing maintenance, but Chloe requires a little more work than any machine she’s ever worked on, since Chloe’s long-deceased owner let her get away with whatever she wanted, and that included installing an aftermarket mod that gave her a very human-like hunger for physical attention.

Saffron and Honey – Part II

(2027)

Fantasy / Sci-fi / Bi-sapphic Romance

I won’t spoil it. But there’s more.

The Golden Standard

(2028)

Sci-fi / Occultism / Disappearance / Police Cover-up / Dystopian Mind Control / Conversion Therapy

Another Hunt and Reese adventure.

Hunt is called to investigate a missing child that the police gave up on far too early. The case is over a year cold, but their client is confident the kid’s still alive, despite the police saying otherwise.

Hunt and Reese are troubled to find out that the kid, like everyone in his school, was using a new application on his neurolink called the Standard. The teachers, the parents, and the company that makes it all say it’s supposed to keep kids safe and healthy. But it won’t even let the kid’s older sister cry about his disappearance. In fact, it won’t even let his sister call him by the right name, and that’s not sitting well with our detective duo.

Saffron and Honey – Part III

(2029)

Fantasy / Sci-fi / Bi-sapphic Romance

Yeah there’s still more. These guys have a lot going on, okay?