FIGHTING THE FUTURE. Astra has finished her training and is now a full-fledged Sentinel, but things are not going well. She suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the public revelation of her relationship with Atlas has caused her popularity to nose-dive. To complicate things, the Teatime Anarchist's intervention has changed the course of events--leaving her with lots of knowledge about the way the future was before the Big One, a complete future-history that is now out of date. And just when she thinks she's getting a handle on things, unfolding events (a bank-robbery and a horrific murder) show that one of the nastier pieces of the old future isn't so out of date after all; unless she solves a murder before it happens, Blackstone is going to die.

The reward for a job well done is another job. After the Sentinels' takedown of the second incarnation of Villains Inc., things are relatively quiet in the great metropolis of Chicago. Astra, aka Hope Corrigan, is able to breathe a little, to hang out with her friends, and even to attend classes (where her professors are starting to think she is a myth). But Blackstone is loading more training and responsibilities on her, and converging events threaten the compromises she has made to balance her superhero career and student life and to protect her family and friends. Worse, a new supervillain has come to town, and it will take all of Chicago's capes to defeat the threat of the Green Man - if he can be defeated at all. When a new supervillain group begins targeting anti-superhuman groups, it becomes apparent that even the Sentinels are going to need help. Because one thing is certain: Chicago is going to have a very bad day. ======================== Young Sentinels is the third book in the high-rated series begun by Wearing the Cape and continued in Villains Inc. and Omega Night.

It was supposed to be a working vacation... For Jacky Bouchard (aka, Artemis: vampire, former night-stalking dark avenger, and reluctant superhero), a trip to the Big Easy was a chance to solidify her new Bouchard identity, meet the grandmother she didn't know she had, and do a favor for the New Orleans Police Department by helping them keep an eye on their local vampires. Watching a bunch of fashion-obsessed goths with fangs should have been easy, but now she's dressing in black and sleeping in a coffin even though living the whole Fiend of The Night stereotype makes her want to vomit. And for someone working undercover, she is getting attacked a lot. When Jacky learns that a master vampire capable of siring progeny with his blood (an urban myth-vampires don't reproduce that way) may be haunting New Orleans, she decides to go hunting. But the streets of the French Quarter are dangerous when you don't know who is hunting you, and Jacky finds herself in trouble up to her neck and needing all the help she can get...

WHO WANTS TO BE A SUPERHERO? Hope did, but she grew out of it. Which made her superhuman breakthrough in the Ashland Bombing, just before starting her freshman year at the University of Chicago, more than a little ironic. And now she has some decisions to make. Given the code-name "Astra" and invited to join the Sentinels, Chicago's premier super-team, will she take up the cape and mask and become a career superhero? Or will she get a handle on her new powers (super-strength has some serious drawbacks) and then get on with her life-plan? In a world where superheroes join unions and have agents, and the strongest and most photogenic ones become literal supercelebrities, the temptation to become a "cape" is strong. But the price can be high-especially if you're "outed" and lose the shield of your secret identity. Becoming a sidekick puts the decision off for awhile, but Hope's life is further complicated when The Teatime Anarchist, the supervillain responsible for the Ashland Bombing, takes an interest in her. Apparently as Astra, Hope is supposed to save the world. Or at least a significant part of it. ------------------------ Wearing the Cape is a 300-page superhero novel for anyone who ever loved comic-book heroes, and wonders how they might behave in the real world.