The Stainless Steel Rat Joins the Circus

Slippery Jim DiGriz, the galaxy's greatest thief and con artist known as the Stainless Steel Rat, has spent numerous novels outwitting conventional forces across dozens of star systems. Now Jim and his wife Angelina find themselves stranded on a boring backwater planet with little to occupy them except computer crime. They encounter a billionaire claiming to be 40,000 years old who offers them millions of credits to investigate a series of unsolved interstellar bank robberies. These robberies consistently occur near circus locations. Jim infiltrates the galactic circus world, but discovers more dangerous adversaries than anticipated among its ringmasters and strongmen. This entry in the series takes Jim's high-wire performer nature to new extremes as he navigates this unfamiliar environment.