Overview

In 1518, the people of Strasbourg began to dance-and could not stop. The Dancing Plague left bodies broken in the streets and historians arguing for centuries. What caused the dance? Poison, possession, mass hysteria. No explanation ever quite fit. Until Dirk Diggins arrived and dropped into the middle of a real historical disaster. He navigates a medieval city where exhaustion is fatal, and authorities believe that some losses are acceptable. Ming, visiting the event to use for her thesis in archival anthropology, disguises herself as a healer, tending to the afflicted while slowly being pulled into the very rhythm she's trying to stop. Their android partner, FIBR, is mistaken for an enchanted knight and reluctantly becomes the city's last line of defense. But the answers to the plague don't exist in 1518. To save Ming and stop the disaster without tearing history apart, Dirk is forced into the far future-where he must bargain for access to forbidden historical archives controlled by a Queen known as a benevolent destroyer of civilizations. To get the answers that he needs, he must first agree to retrieve her beloved pet Quimburd's lost toy, and hope that doing so won't start a war. There, Dirk discovers that the greatest threat to humanity isn't chaos, but systems designed to manage suffering efficiently. And Dirk Diggins has never been good at efficiency. And he finds out that behind it all, throughout time and space, is an agency pulling the strings. Blending historical fiction, time travel, science fiction mystery, and dry noir humor, Dirk Diggins and the Case of the Dancing Plague is a genre-bending novel about love, agency, and the dangerous idea that not everything broken should be optimized. Some cases aren't solved. They're refused.

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