Synopsis: From the back cover of the Bantam first edition: "He was the consummate killing machine, the most famed bounty hunter in the galaxy - Jefferson Nighthawk, known and feared as the Widowmaker. But Nighthhawk has been frozen for over a century, awaiting the cure for a deadly disease. Now his is cloned as a twenty-three-year-old man and sent to hunt down and kill a notorious assassin. The cloned Nighthawk has the Widowmaker's talents and instincts, and the same deadly determination to get what he wants. And what he wants if Melisande, the beautiful mistress of the man he has been sent to kill. But despite the qualities Nighthawk has inherited from the Widowmaker, he sorely lacks his namesake's lifetime of experience, his knowledge of the dark side of human and alien nature. And in the lawless frontier worlds where betrayal is an art form and treachery a way of life, innocence itself can be the deadliest disease."