Official Author Website
Read my review of The Better Part of Darkness 
Read my review of The Darkest Edge of Dawn 
Read Fantasy Book Critic's review of The Hour Of Dust and Ashes 
Read Fantasy Book Critic’s review of Shadows Before The Sun 
Read Fantasy Book Critic's Interview with Kelly Gay 

I’m a big fan of Kelly Gay and her dark Charlie Madigan urban fantasy series. The series combined the gritty underbelly of Atlanta with inter-dimensional fantasy, and viola the readers were given an urban fantasy series that bucked most of the urban fantasy tropes and explored new avenues.

The series was published by an imprint of Simon & Schuster and after four books being published, the series was dropped by the publisher for reasons that weren’t quite sure but were most likely financial ones. The fourth book Shadows Before The Sun was published nearly three years ago and since then we have been waiting to hear about the next book in the series.

The author recently revealed via her newsletter that the next book is titled “The Cold Light Of Day” and will be released in the summer. The book will be self-published by the author and will be released in e-book and trade paperback format. The author revealed a bit about the story in an email and here’s what it’s going to be about:

“The tale begins where SHADOWS BEFORE THE SUN left off, with Pen, the Druid King, pressuring Charlie to find out who killed certain characters in the preceding title, and the mysterious Leander returning to make Charlie and Hank an offer they can’t refuse. And, of course, along the way Charlie and Hank’s relationship intensifies, Emma’s powers grow, and Rex gets into deep, deep trouble. “

Obviously there will be a bit more to the story and I can’t wait for the official blurb reveal. Here’s looking to more of Charlie, Rex, Hank, Pen & the others…

Order Grim Mistresses HERE
Read Beauty In Ruins' review of Grim Mistresses

Yesterday was also the release day of Grimm Mistresses by Ragnarok Publications. Check out the amazing cover by Brittany Smith and also here’s the blurb:

 "Remember the Grimm Brothers? Those dark fairy tales that made you leave the light on long before Disney went and sanitized them? Well, we do! Now the MISTRESSES GRIMM take back the night, five female authors who will leave you shuddering deliciously. Get ready to leave the lights on again with four pieces of short fiction bringing the Grimm Brother’s tales into the present. Be advised: these aren’t your children’s fairy tales!"

Here are the five amazing ladies who are lending their talents to this amazing collection and given below is the table of contents:

"The Night Air" by Stacey Turner
"Little Dead Red" by Mercedes M. Yardley 
"Nectar" by Allison M. Dickson
"Hazing Cinderella" by C.W. LaSart
"The Leopard's Pelt" by S.R. Cambridge 

 So get yourself a copy of this dark, enticing collection, I'll be reviewing it in the upcoming weeks as well.

Official Author Website 
Read Fantasy Book Critic's review of The Whitefire Crossing 
Read Fantasy Book Critic's review of The Tainted City 
Read Fantasy Book Critic's multi-author interview with Courtney Schafer 

We are mightily indebted to Courtney for giving us the golden opportunity to host the cover & blurb reveal of The Labyrinth Of Flame last year. The cover art (seen above) was provided by series regular David Palumbo & the cover design is done by Martha Wade.

Here’s what The Labyrinth Of Flame is going to be about:

"Dev's never been a man afraid of a challenge. Not only has he kept his vow to his dead mentor, rescuing a child in the face of impossible odds, but he's freed his mage friend Kiran from both the sadistic master who seeks to enslave him and the foreign Council that wants to kill him."

"But Kiran's master Ruslan is planning a brutal revenge, one that will raze an entire country to blood and ashes. Kiran is the key to stopping Ruslan; yet Kiran is dying by inches, victim of the Alathian Council's attempt to chain him. Worse yet, Dev and Kiran have drawn the attention of demons from the darkest of ancient legends. Demons whose power Dev knows is all too real, and that he has every reason to fear." 

"A fear that grows, as he and Kiran struggle to outmaneuver Ruslan and uncover the secrets locked in Kiran's forgotten childhood. For the demons are playing their own deadly game - and the price of survival may be too terrible to bear."

The kickstarter for the book has been live for the past six days and already has been fully funded at four thousand dollars and is currently very close to reaching its first stretch goal. I’m a backer and I’m hoping many of you consider joining in the kickstarter for this tremendous trilogy ending.

Official Author Website
Read Fantasy Book Critic's review of No Return
Read The Debut Novel: A Series Of Intentions by Zachary Jernigan (guest post)

Zachary Jernigan's No Return was a debut that won me over completely nearly two years ago and now Zachary is releasing the sequel to his complex debut via Nightshade books. Zack was kind enough to allow us to exclusively reveal the cover for Shower Of Stones which has superb art work by Claudia Noble. Also check out the enticing blurb below thanks to the publisher. The book has a tentative release date of July 7th and I can't wait to immerse myself back into the complex world that is Jeroun.

Official Book Blurb — At the moment of his greatest victory, before a crowd of thousands, the warrior Vedas Tezul renounced his faith, calling for revolt against the god Adrash, imploring mankind to unite in this struggle. 

Good intentions count for nothing. In the three months since his sacrilegious pronouncement, the world has not changed for the better. In fact, it is now on the verge of dying. The Needle hangs broken in orbit above Jeroun, each of its massive iron spheres poised to fall and blanket the planet’s surface in dust. Long-held truces between Adrashi and Anadrashi break apart as panic spreads. 

With no allegiance to either side, the disgraced soldier Churls walks into the divided city of Danoor with a simple plan: murder the monster named Fesuy Amendja, and retrieve from captivity the only two individuals that still matter to her — Vedas Tezul, and the constructed man Berun. The simple plan goes awry, as simple plans do, and in the process Churls and her companions are introduced to one of the world’s deepest secrets: a madman, insisting he is the link to an ancient world, offering the most tempting lie of all . . . hope. 

Concluding the visceral, inventive narrative begun in No Return, Shower of Stones pits men against gods and swords against civilization-destroying magic in the fascinatingly harsh world of Jeroun.

Hi! I’m Elizabeth Bear, and I’m salted caramel gelato. Er, I mean, I’m eating salted caramel gelato, and let me tell you, this stuff is a reason I’m glad I live in the future where ice cream flavors like this exist. But I’m not actually here to sell you Häagen-Dazs, fake umlaut and all. I’m here because I’m the author of Karen Memory, a new book that came out this month, and I’ve been invited to Fantasy Book Critic to talk to you about it. (Maybe you’d rather I was selling you Häagen-Dazs? Well, you’re on a book blog, so you’re pretty much stuck now.)

Karen Memory is a steampunk Weird West adventure set in a fictional city in the Pacific Northwest. (I don’t feel too bad about that—I’m a New Englander, and everybody from H. P. Lovecraft to Stephen King to Jane Langton has felt free to shoehorn an extra town or two into the landscape around here. So I think it’s traditional.) 

The book stars the nearly-eponymous Karen Memery. Karen’s a sixteen-year-old bordello girl with an outsize vocabulary, a shaky sense of grammar, and a complete inability to stay out of trouble for more than fifteen minutes at a time. A number of people have asked me why I might want to go and set a steampunk story in the Pacific Northwest.

Well, I’m not the first, by any means. Off the top of my head, there’s Cherie Priest’s delightful Boneshaker, for example. And an interesting thing that’s happened in the past few years is a real groundswell of the Weird Western, a subgenre that used to be pretty much staked out by Stephen King and Joe Lansdale—and also was a lot more horror focused.

But I started writing Karen Memory in 2009, and the thing I notice is that Emma Bull’s fabulous Western fantasy, Territory, came out a few years before then—and that since, there’s been a steady creep of steampunk elements into Westerns. The TV show and later movie The Wild Wild West is no doubt extremely seminal here, but then we find the blossoming of Cherie’s books, and those of Gemma Files starting with A Book of Tongues, R.S. Belcher’s The Six-Gun Tarot, John Horner Jacob’s The Incorruptibles, Catherynne M. Valente’s Six-Gun Snow White, Tim Pratt’s The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, Felix Gilman’s The Half-Made-World… well, if you just want a list, Goodreads has a couple!

And apparently they’re bringing back Westworld now? Robot gunslingers? Well all right.

So, the simple answer is because it’s a fascinating time. Steampunk is often criticized for assuming the trappings of empire without bothering to engage with its colonialism and class issues, but honestly, that doesn’t seem to be the case with most of the Weird West steampunk I’ve read. I know that one of the things that attracted me to the Gold Rush northwest was exactly that—the chance to unfurl a cast of characters that draws some of its interest and conflict from the often whitewashed diversity of the West; the chance to show the perspective of a working-class heroine; the chance to talk about rapacious exploitation. 

And there’s the added attraction of it being a gorgeous landscape with so much scope for adventure! Meanwhile, let’s talk about the Ben & Jerry’s salted caramel blondie stuff. Because it’s totally sick, yo, and I mean that in the best of all possible ways…

GUEST AUTHOR INFORMATION: Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. This, coupled with a childhood tendency to read the dictionary for fun, led her inevitably to penury, intransigence, the mispronunciation of common English words, and the writing of speculative fiction.

She was the recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005 and has won two Hugo Awards for her short fiction along with a Sturgeon Award and the Locus Award for Best First Novel.She lives in Massachusetts with a Giant Ridiculous Dog. Her partner, acclaimed fantasy author Scott Lynch, lives in Wisconsin.