The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory

In the vastness of space, the crimes just get bigger and Slippery Jim diGriz, the Stainless Steel Rat, is the biggest criminal of them all. He can con humans, aliens and any number of robots time after time. Jim is so slippery that all the inter-galactic cops can do is make him one of their own.

At the beginning of the novel, the Stainless Steel Rat believes he has pulled off a successful bank job, but is out-conned into working for the government. In the Special Corps, the elite law-enforcement and spy agency led by the former greatest crook in the Galaxy, Harold P. Inskipp (a.k.a. Inskipp the Uncatchable), he joins the ranks of an organization that is entirely constituted of ex-criminals like himself. In the novel, he has several adventures during which he believes he has escaped from the Corps, and meets his love interest, Angelina, who is even more sociopathic than he is - she too is a criminal genius but lacks Jim's moral strictures against killing. She is attempting to have an illegal space battleship built on a backwoods planet. It transpires that Angelina was born unattractive and committed crimes to pay for her transformation into a beautiful woman; her psychological traumas are cured when Jim captures her, but she retains her allure and her criminal tendencies and joins Jim in the Special Corps.