happy release day! (part I)

Today is the official publication day for:

C.E. Murphy’s Truthseeker

Gifted with an uncanny intuition, Lara Jansen nonetheless thinks there is nothing particularly special about her. All that changes when a handsome but mysterious man enters her quiet Boston tailor shop and reveals himself to be a prince of Faerie. What’s more, Dafydd ap Caerwyn claims that Lara is a truthseeker, a person with the rare talent of being able to tell truth from falsehood. Dafydd begs Lara to help solve his brother’s murder, of which Dafydd himself is the only suspect.

“Truthseeker is pure C.E. Murphy at her best. Deftly switching between modern Boston and the alternate reality of the Barrow-lands, Truthseeker builds to an ending that will have you screaming for more.”—Kim Harrison, author of the Hollows series

Jay Lake’s The Sky that Wraps

Lake’s sixth collection offers 25 tales written since 2007’s The River Knows Its Own. The collection is bookended by popular favorites: the haunting “The American Dead” and “The Sky That Wraps the World Round, past the Blue and into the Black,” a moody meditation on mistakes and the end of the universe. One of Lake’s strengths is his ability to channel classic writers and styles, such as the heroic fantasy of Robert E. Howard in “The Leopard’s Paw,” Cordwainer Smith in the baroque “The Man with One Bright Eye,” pulp SF in “Lehr, Rex,” and space opera adventure in “To Raise a Mutiny Betwixt Yourselves.” Fans of Lake’s novels will especially appreciate the tie-ins to Green, Mainspring, and Trial of Flowers, while the diversity of settings and styles makes this a nice introduction to Lake’s stylish craftsmanship. –Publishers Weekly

Elizabeth Bear’s By the Mountain Bound now in mass market paperback.

“In this complex prequel to Hugo-winner Bear’s All the Windwracked Stars (2008), Ragnarok has already occurred, but the world must still be cleansed of the residue of the former realm. When immortal einherjar war-leader Strifbjorn rescues a strange woman from drowning, she claims to be the Lady, a long-awaited deity, and defeats Strifbjorn’s champion and lover, Mingan the Gray Wolf, to take command. The ensuing internal power struggles set the einherjar at odds while the Lady attempts to rally the community against a supposedly imminent attack by giants. Numerous fantasy authors adopt the tropes of Norse mythology, but Bear actively pursues them, channeling those myths directly rather than overlaying them on more familiar ones. The result demands much from readers, but repays it in vivid, sensual imagery of a wholly different world.” –Publishers Weekly

P.C. Hodgell’s Seeker’s Bane also now in mass market paperback.

Two epic novels of fantasy adventure in one volume:

Seeker’s Mask: After an epic adventure that will become the stuff of legend, Jame has been reunited with her older brother Torisen and with her people, the Kencyrath. But when she is placed in the Women’s Halls and expected to become a normal, quiet Kencyr lady, normal and quiet are not what the Women’s Halls are going to get. Shadow Guild Assassins, ghosts, and other strange beings are soon after her, sprung not only from her own adventurous past but from the tragic, mysterious events that nearly annihilated her family in her father’s time.

To Ride a Rathorn: Jame’s adventures continue as she arrives at the randon military college Tentir to face cut-throat competition and find even more buried, poisonous family secrets. The Kencyr have a phrase, “to ride a rathorn,” referring to a task too dangerous either to accomplish or to give up. This is true for Jame both figuratively, given her military career in a college which no Highborn girl has ever attended before, and literally, in that she is being stalked by one of these murderous, ivory-clad creatures whose mother she killed and who is now after her blood.