happy release day! (part II)

Mike Shevdon’s Sixty-One Nails: Courts of the Feyre, Book 1 makes its U.S. debut today with The Road to Bedlam launching in the U.K. tomorrow (and coming to our shores in October).

There is a secret war raging beneath the streets of London. A dark magic will be unleashed by the Untainted… unless a new hero can be found. Sixty-One Nails follows Niall Petersen, from a suspected heart attack on the London Underground, into the hidden world of the Feyre, an uncanny place of legend that lurks just beyond the surface of everyday life. The Untainted, the darkest of the Seven Courts, have made their play for power, and unless Niall can recreate the ritual of the Sixty-One Nails, their dark dominion will enslave all of the Feyre, and all of humankind too.

Ken Scholes’ Canticle, the 2nd book in the Psalms of Isaak, is out in mass market today.

The conspiracy deepens in this sequel to Scholes’ epic, marvelously complex fantasy debut (Lamentation, 2009). In the previous installment, ancient spells of the Wizard King Xhum Y’Zir leveled the city of Windwir, repository of knowledge from the Old World. The instigator of the destruction, a Y’Zirite cult, reveals itself as the sequel opens by assassinating several major political figures, an act which the cult sees as the necessary prelude to the advent of its prophesied Crimson Empress. As civil war spreads across the Named Lands, nobleman schemer Vlad Li Tam and his extensive family search for the stronghold of their foe; the Gypsy King Rudolfo seeks a cure for his ailing infant son Jakob, heralded by Y’Zirites as the Child of Promise; Windwir survivor and prophetic dreamer Neb seeks his destiny in the Churning Wastes; and his beloved, the young Marsh Queen Winters, faces the unpleasant, deadly truth that the Y’Zirite cult sprang from her own people. Not only is Scholes a capable world builder, he ably handles the tough task of keeping the series momentum going, intensifying the mystery so deftly that even if readers can’t foresee where the story’s going, it’s clear that the author knows exactly what he’s doing. — Kirkus, Starred Review

Also, a special e-book offer this month for the first book, Lamentation, for just $2.99 Kindle | Nook | Sony

Ekaterina Sedia’s The Secret History of Moscow is now available in mass market as well.

Every city contains secret places. Moscow in the tumultuous 1990s is no different, its citizens seeking safety in a world below the streets – a dark, cavernous world of magic, weeping trees, and albino jackdaws, where exiled pagan deities and faery-tale creatures whisper strange tales to those who would listen. Galina is a young woman caught, like her contemporaries, in the seeming lawlessness of the new Russia. In the midst of this chaos, her sister Maria turns into a jackdaw and flies away – prompting Galina to join Yakov, a policeman investigating a rash of recent disappearances. Their search will take them to the underground realm of hidden truths and archetypes, to find themselves caught between reality and myth, past and present, honor and betrayal . . . the secret history of Moscow.

“The Secret History of Moscow is a truly remarkable performance, written in a consistently graceful and focused prose, and it succeeds both as a coherent fantasy novel and a meditation on the anxieties of history.” –Gary K. Wolfe, Locus