SETH W. JAMES

New Novel Pre-release Announcement: “An Uncalculated Risk,” Book 3 of “The Cain Series,” Coming May 2025.

March 5, 2025

By Seth W. James

An Uncalculated Risk, book 3 of The Cain Series, will publish this May, 2025, in ebook, paperback, and hardcover formats.  Like all Cain Series novels, An Uncalculated Risk is an episodic, near-future, cyberpunk, science fiction novel.  In this installment, Cain and Francesca travel to South America to uncover the monstrously wealthy force behind a mercenary invasion of Bolivia, which has disrupted their tin exports and, consequently, Francesca’s seawall project.  Nothing is every as it seems, though, and the cat-and-mouse of spycraft soon escalates to armed conflict.

Back-cover copy:

“In the fusion age, war for commerce had become a commonplace.  But when an unusually well-financed mercenary force seized the Alto Madidi mining complex in the Bolivian Andes, they set off a cascade of events that brought the global tin market to its knees—and threatened Francesca Pieralisi’s seawall project.  Tin was indispensable to the manufacture of construction exoskeletons, called “connies,” and connies were the only means by which the seawall could be built, to reclaim the farmlands that would stave off the looming threat of famine.

To discover who had hired the mercenaries—and to determine if their goal was simply theft or an attack on EU interests—EU INTCEN tasked Francesca (and, with her, Cain) to go to Bolivia and find the truth.  What they found was a plot by the richest man on Earth—or off of it—and a global extortion conspiracy involving bribery, kidnapping, and war.  Francesca, undaunted by the odds, would stop at nothing to save her seawall project, but soon found herself betrayed by her own zeal, manipulated into compromising her reputation and career, and saw her life pushed to the cliff’s edge.

Cain must now fight through a web of off-world, sovereign corporations, conspiracies and counter-conspiracies, to make a lie the truth, and to pull Francesca back from oblivion.  From Sovereign Trade Zones in the American South to the rainforests of South America, Cain battles not only to remove the mercenary brigade, but to short-circuit the machinations of a trillionaire in An Uncalculated Risk, book 3 of The Cain Series.”

Like Ethos of Cain, book 1 of The Cain Series, An Uncalculated Risk is told in five parts, as Cain and Francesca pursue one clue after another, hunting down those responsible for the invasion.  I’ll release the cover art next month—and it’s a good one, too—followed by publication of the novel in May.

As a special sneak preview, An Uncalculated Risk will likely NOT be the only Cain Series novel published in 2025.  I’m on track to have book 4 in the series ready for publication by the end of the year.  Whether that means late November or early December remains to be seen; there are several factors involved, including cover creation, proofreading, typesetting, etc, and any one of them could suffer a delay.  I’ll have a better idea by summer’s end and will post another update on book 4 then. For now, I’d like to say thank you to every reader who has enjoyed—and especially to those who took the time to review, always massively appreciated—Ethos of Cain and A Desperate Measure.  I hope you will check out An Uncalculated Risk this May.