John Grimes, Rim Runner

Further adventures on the edge of space and time! Once a spacer, always a spacer. Now practical, hard-headed Grimes is not the sort to believe in ghosts. But he's willing to give psychics a chance when shapely Sonya Verrill, a commander in the Federation Survey Service, proposes a ghost-hunting expedition in the sector around Kingsolving's Planet. Out where the fabric of space wears thin, ships have encountered Rim Ghosts - apparitions of craft and crewmates from alternate universes. When Grimes organizes a seance to make contact, their ship is yanked Into the Alternate Universe, and their only hope of getting home gain may lie in a lost relic - a sleeper ship from the first age of space exploration. After their wild ghost ride, Grimes and Sonya embark on a wholly different adventure: marriage. But running their own little shipping company takes a back seat to danger when a distress call leads the pair to an alien ship from an alternate universe - a ship carrying Contraband from Otherspace - mutant rats who evolved to rule their universe ... and threaten to break through into ours. In The Rim Gods, Grimes is drawn into four perilous adventures, when a ship full of religious fanatics uses a psionic to summon God, when a rogue Rim Worlder tries to sell advanced weaponry to the robber barons of Tangaroa, when trouble in the form of a predatory starfish threatens to ruin the economy of Mellise, and when an impossible planet appears out of nowhere - a world where dragons, fairies, and sleeping beauties are real. Another visit to Kingsolving's Planet, where the boundaries between reality and surreality are almost non-existent, finds The Commander at Sea. For he is whisked to a continuum in which fictional characters exist, and he is surprised to meet Sherlock Holmes, Lady Chatterly, Tarzan and Jane, and ... A. Bertram Chandler?