Rand Bauer is good at his job. Not the glamorous kind of good—the kind that involves forged paperwork, warehouse security systems, and knowing exactly when to disappear. As a repo man in a world where alien technology is quietly making his career obsolete, he's made peace with the fact that his skills don't exactly translate to anything larger.

Then he walks into the wrong warehouse on the wrong night, and everything changes.

One chance encounter pulls Rand into the world of interstellar bounty hunting, the politics of a civilization spanning hundreds of star systems, and a mission with consequences he's only beginning to understand. He doesn't have the training. He doesn't have the contacts. What he has is the ability to read a room, think fast, and refuse to quit—which turns out to be more valuable than anyone expected, including him.

Arrival & Departure is the story of how Rand Bauer stops being a repo man and starts becoming something the galaxy doesn't have a name for yet. Along the way he picks up a crew he didn't plan on: a tracker whose electromagnetic senses make him the most honest being in any room, and an engineer who is better at everything than she lets on. By the end of the book, the ship has one more crew member than Rand intended—small, quietly opinionated, and impossible to leave behind. The Orinthal Stellar Consortium spans thousands of worlds. Earth is running out of time to qualify for membership. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, a repo man from Lancaster, California is figuring out that his entire career was, improbably, excellent preparation for this.

He's still not sure he was the right choice.

He's starting to think that might not matter.