In the Garden of Iden

"Baker's characterizations are robust and detailed, as is her development of the historical setting . . . [Readers] will recognize in Baker a fantasist of considerable promise." —Publishers Weekly The Dr. Zeus Company, working from the twenty-fourth century, finds orphans in the past and makes them immortal, training them to preserve lost treasure, cultural artifacts, and extinct life forms for the future—and for profit. Mendoza is one of those orphans, rescued from the Spanish Inquisition, augmented into a cyborg indistinguishable from a normal human, and trained as a botanist in service to the Company. Mendoza’s first assignment is in Elizabethan England, where she is sent to collect samples from Sir Walter Iden’s prized gardens. Everything goes to plan, until she meets Nicholas Harpole, a mortal preacher of radical ideas, and falls in love—and is forced to confront the ways her transformation has set her apart from the rest of humanity. In the Garden of Iden is the engrossing and imaginative start to the wild ride of the Company novels.