Anna left at dawn.
She entered the Martian desert, all alone.
Where is she going?
What secret is she hiding?

Thirty years after the Mars exploration mission Hera, whose crew died in mysterious circumstances, the ensuing political issues that slowed NASA's race to conquer space have finally ended. This time the five members of the new Isis mission will not travel the 400 million kilometres for a short visit. This time they are destined to become the first colonisers of the Red Planet.

The science fiction series "Red Desert", set in the near future, includes four books.
The first one, "Point of No Return", is a novella.

In what looks like a suicide attempt, Swedish exobiologist Anna Persson, crew member of the Isis, secretly leaves Station Alpha at the crack of dawn to travel deep into the Martian desert in a pressurised rover.
As she journeys to the limit of her two day oxygen supply, she shows us memories of events from her past leading up to the mission. Little by little, as time and oxygen run out, she reveals the real Anna.
Whatever her goal, wherever it is, will Anna reach her destination?

The second book is "Red Desert - People of Mars" (a novel).

Follow Anna Persson (AnnaPerssonDR) on Twitter!

--- This is the first book in a series of four and it ends with a cliffhanger. ---

This book is written in British English.
About the Author: Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli is an Italian science fiction and thriller author.
She has lived in Cagliari (Sardinia, Italy) since 1993, earning a degree in biology and working as a writer, sci-entific and literary translator, and freelance web copywriter. In the past she also worked as researcher, tutor and professor's assistant in the field of ecology at Dipartimento di Biologia Animale ed Ecologia of the University of Cagliari.
As a cinema addict, she started by writing screenplays and fan fictions inspired by the movies.

She has written original fiction since 2009.
Between 2012-2013 she published a hard science fiction series set on Mars and titled "Deserto rosso".
The series, which includes four books, was also published as omnibus in December 2013 & hit No. 1 on the Italian Kindle Store in November 2014.
"Deserto rosso" was published in English, with the title "Red Desert", between 2014 and 2015.
The first book of the series is "Red Desert - Point of No Return"; the second is "Red Desert - People of Mars"; the third is "Red Desert - Invisible Enemy"; and the final book is "Red Desert - Back Home".

She also authored three crime thrillers in the Detective Eric Shaw trilogy - "Il mentore" (2014), "Sindrome" (2016), and "Oltre il limite" (2017) -, an action thriller titled "Affinità d'intenti" (2015), and four more science fiction novels titled "L'isola di Gaia" (2014), "Per caso" (2015), "Ophir. Codice vivente" (2016), & "Sirius. In caduta libera" (2018).
"Il mentore" was published in English by AmazonCrossing with the title "The Mentor" in 2015 (it hit No. 1 in the Kindle Store).
"Affinità d'intenti" was published in English as "Kindred Intentions" in 2016.

All her books have been Amazon bestsellers in Italy so far.

She's also a podcaster at FantascientifiCast, an Italian podcast about science fiction, an Italian Representative of Mars Initiative, and a member of the International Thriller Writers organization.

She's often a guest both in Italy and abroad during book fairs, including Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino (Turin Book Fair) and Frankfurter Buchmesse (Frankfurt Book Fair), local publishing events, university conventions as well as classes, where she gives speeches or conducts workshops about self-publishing and genre fiction writing.

As a science fiction and Star Wars fan, she is known in the Italian online community by her nickname, Anakina.