New Release: The Stygian Blades
The Stygian Blades is out!
You can buy it on Amazon, read it on Kindle Unlimited, or have it read to you on Audible, whichever suits your habits and your commute.
This one's been a long time coming. It's 420+ pages across five acts, and it went through the full gauntlet: first draft, burning the first draft with fire, second draft, existential dread, developmental edits, rewrites, and then more rewrites, because apparently I don't know how to leave well enough alone. It's the book I've wanted to put in your hands for a long while now, and I'm proud of it in a way I don't usually admit out loud.
Fair warning before you dive in: this is not a polite book. It's dark and it's bawdy. Its characters lie, drink, scheme, swear creatively, and fall into bed with each other like people who aren't sure they'll get another chance. If that's not your cup of tea, no hard feelings. If it is, pull up a stool. The first round's on Kit.
Here's what you're in for:
Kit arrives in the capital broke and starving, and within a day she’s cut the wrong purse: that of Chócht the Black, captain of a band of problem-solvers who do “dirty deeds, dirt-cheap, and with decided discretion.” Rather than collect the bounty on her head, he claims it as her bond and puts her nimble fingers to work.
The job’s a simple burglary. What Kit nicks on the side is anything but—a puzzle tube that reveals a plot to unseat the queen’s heretic bastard arse and makes the Stygian Blades accessories to treason. Now the conspirators want it back, and worse, the queen’s own spymaster might be in on it. They can’t run, can’t inform, can’t pretend they never opened it. The only way out is to unravel the conspiracy themselves—before either side unravels them.
Woven through it all is Rose, the elfin strumpet they lodge with, who’s vexed to discover Kit lacks a yard—but swears to keep her secret. Two girls sold by men who should have protected them, trading wounds in the dark until friendship turns into something neither has a word for.
The Stygian Blades
A dark and bawdy late-Tudor secondary world fantasy featuring mages, rogues, trulls—and a sticky-fingered actress—racing to save their own skins (they couldn’t give a clipped farthing about the Crown).
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