Crystal Singer

Killashandra Ree has spent ten grueling years in musical training, anticipating interstellar celebrity as a vocal soloist. She is young, beautiful, and still without prospects. After learning that a flaw in her voice will prevent her from singing lead, she hears of the mysterious Heptite Guild on the planet Ballybran, where the fabled Black Crystal is found. Mining this strange form of crystal is a dangerous occupation but to Killa, the risks are acceptable. Remarkably, her adaptation to crystal mining is unusually rapid and easy and Killashandra advances quickly. The problem is-few people who land on Ballybran ever leave.

The exhilarating adventures of Anne McCaffrey's bestselling “Crystal Singer” series continue with Killashandra, a story that mixes interplanetary political intrigue with passionate romance. In this installment, Killashandra Ree's crystal claim has been exhausted, forcing her to take a new assignment and leave her new lover back on their native Ballybran. She goes undercover on a distant, desolate planet, searching desperately for the crystal that will save her and, quite possibly, determine the fate of the entire universe.

Killashandra, one of the most gifted singers on Ballybran, is drawn like a magnet to the song of crystal. In order to work with crystal, singers are infected with a symbiotic life form that heals them and gives them near eternal life-but slowly destroys their memories. Since crystal singing brings Killashandra ecstasy, she doesn't mind the initial small annoyances of memory loss. What she hadn't counted on was the loneliness she felt when her heart still remembered what her mind had forgotten-the names of her friends and lovers. Can the crystal that destroyed her memory somehow restore it? By reclaiming her unpleasant past, can Killashandra step forward into the future?