Maxima Library

In this prequel to the Stainless Steel Rat, Slippery Jim is a brash 17-year-old who has left his parents' porcuswine farm, planning to embark on a life of crime. The book opens with Jim bungling a bank job so that he can be arrested and sent to prison, where he plans to learn the art of being a master criminal. Deciding that the Bishop should be his mentor, Jim sets about proving himself worthy of the master's attention. He eventually has to flee his home planet of Bit O' Heaven with the Bishop, but Garth, the Captain of the ship who promised them safe passage, sells them into slavery. The latter part of the book details Jim's adventures on the planet Spiovente, a semi-industrial world fighting feudal wars with weapons smuggled in (against League regulations) by Captain Garth.

The 25th century's most outrageous outlaw is back--and this time it means war! "Slippery Jim" diGriz, better known as the Stainless Steel Rat, is seeking revenge for the murder of his mentor-in-crime. But to do so, he must join an army and oppose its iron-fisted dictator--and keep a planet from being enslaved.

Cutting a deal with the authorities to escape a death sentence, Slippery Jim deGriz prepares to retrieve a missing alien artifact from the Liokukae, a planet that serves as a dumping ground for the Galactic League's misfits.

In the vastness of space, the crimes just get bigger and Slippery Jim diGriz, the Stainless Steel Rat, is the biggest criminal of them all. He can con humans, aliens and any number of robots time after time. Jim is so slippery that all the inter-galactic cops can do is make him one of their own.

It was totally impossible for Cliaand to wage interstellar war...but the crazy little planet was winning, whatever the odds. And there wasn't much the peaceful galaxy could do...except send Slippery Jim di Griz - the Stainless Steel Rat - to wage his own kind of guerrilla campaign against the grey men of Cliaand and their leader, the indomitable Kraj. But then the Rat was aided by a band of liberated Amazons and his own beloved, murderous Angelina...and they had to swing the odds in his favour.

Someone was tampering with time, altering the past to eliminate the present, fading people out of existence into a timeless limbo. One of the victims was Angelina, the wife of James de Griz, better known as the Stainless Steel Rat.

After saving the world, diGriz is called on to save the universe. Liberating his two, now teenage, twin' sons from a military boarding school and penitentiary, diGriz sets out to free his wife, who has been arrested by the tax men. But the family is soon fighting an enemy of a different sort, when the humans-only galaxy of the League is invaded by all manner of hideous aliens. The Rat, disguised in the most hideous combination of alien physical features, is sent into the centre of the aliens' stronghold, where he finds himself the object of desire among the aliens. His task is to stop the aliens, who plan to wipe out every human in the universe.

You can't keep a good rat down, not one as slippery as Jim di Griz alias the Stainless Steel Rat. And you can't keep his nose out of trouble either. Jim and the lethal, luscious Angelina owe themselves a honeymoon and Paraiso-Aqui looks like the place. Settled long ago by voyagers from the southern continent of Earth (or Dirt as it was known) Paraiso is warm and easy. But all is not well in paradise. The serpentine tyrant General Julio Zapilote is about to sail back into office in another rigged election, and the chance to scupper him is just too good for Jim to miss. Corruption, bribery, graft and chicanery - for the Rat it's just like coming home.

Sinister religions, missing physicists, super strings and retarded entropy; it's all in a day's work for Slippery Jim DiGriz, the Stainless Steel Rat, the Universe's greatest ever thief and con artist. But this time the stakes are rather higher than even Slippery Jim is used to. His wife Angelina has disappeared and he has nothing to go on except a pool of blood and a severed hand (formerly belonging to a physicist of stellar repute) - and the fact that she has expressed an interest in The Temple of Eternal Truth, a cult offering a sneak peek at heaven - for a price. But there's a job to do and the Stainless Steel Rat is the man to do it. After all, the devil makes work for idle hands...

Slippery Jim DiGriz. The galaxy's greatest thief and con artist: the Stainless Steel Rat. For novel upon novel, Jim DiGriz has outfoxed the forces of conventionality, cutting a stylish swathe through dozens of star systems. Now, Slippery Jim and his beautiful wife Angelina find themselves becalmed on a painfully boring backwater planet, with nothing to do but practice their skills at computer crime. Then they meet a billionaire who claims to be 40,000 years old--who offers them millions of credits to investigate a string of unsolved interstellar bank robberies. Robberies which, it turns out, always happen when the circus is nearby. . . . In a sense, The Stainless Steel Rat has always been a high-wire performer. Now, as he infiltrates the world of the galactic big top, he's taking the role to extremes . . . and drawing the attention of more dangerous ringmasters and strongmen than he ever expected. Will this be his final show? Has Slippery Jim finally leapt for his last trapeze? Naaah.