Rescuing a little girl in trouble sets the thief, Mouse's, life on wild ride. Penelope is a seer, able to see all possible outcomes resulting from the choices that lie a few seconds ahead of her. This makes her valuable, dangerous and in danger. Leaving behind her mentor, Merlin, Mouse takes the girl on an intergalactic quest for safety from the bounty hunters who want her dead or imprisoned.

With the help of the Forever Kid, an Immortal who seeks to either die or see others to their deaths, the young woman and child stay one step ahead of danger, until a desperate gamble takes a bad turn that forces Mouse to make a choice she never anticipated.

With surprising twists, Mr. Resnick presents his readers with a true moral dilema that will make them think. More in depth characterization would have made this a more fascinating novel; nonetheless, it is thought provoking and disturbing.

This book is set in the same universe as many of Mike Resnick's other novels, notably Santiago and The Dark Lady. Like the other tales this covers many planets and great stretches of the inner frontier, the edges of mankind's movement towards the galactic core, an area outside the control of the empire and hence and area where the lawless, the larger than life adventurous characters would congregate.

And Mr. Resnick's characters are certainly larger than life, resembling as they do legendary figures from America's Old West. This image is aided by some wonderful character names; herein we encounter The Forever Kid, Cemetery Smith, The Iceman and Mock Turtle.

This story involves a young girl Penelope Bailey, a young girl who has a power that some fear and other seek to control. She can predict the future, or rather she sees all possible futures and through manipulation can affect which one comes to be. She is befriended by a thief, the Mouse who promises to keep her safe from all pursuers - not an easy task in a galaxy where human life does not seem to hold all that much value.

As is the case with most of this author's fiction this moves at an incredible pace. This is not the kind of SF where you are presented with lages of technical reasons why the spaceships work, or discussing intricacies of physics. The emphasis here is on the interaction of the characters.

But whereas a number of character-lead books I have read involve page after page of intricate conversation where the protagonists explain there every thought, the writing here is much more concise. Hence the feeling of an incredible speed in the plot.

This is a SF adventure on a grand scale. Once more I reached the end of a Mike Resnick novel too soon, as I'm always wanting more. However, and fortunately in the case of this novel, there are two more to be read following this book's conclusion.