Dear frustrated US readers who keep asking where they can get hold of the thief-taker books over on that side of the Atlantic. Look, frankly I share your pain. You’d have thought as the author I’d be the one person most likely to know. Well up to a point I do – you can get the first two from Amazon if you don’t mind getting the kindle edition. Amazon lists what appears to be a paperback US edition of The Warlock’s Shadow due to come out in June next year. Why the second one of three is coming out but not the first, I have no idea. I can tell you the reasons for all the delay and uncertainty: no US publisher wants to take it on. Allegedly my UK publisher has now given up and is distributing to the US via Trafalgar Books who do this sort of thing all the time. Can I find them there? No. If anyone out there has any kind of answer, do please share it so I can share it in turn. I realise there aren’t that many of you out there who care, but if you get as far as reading this, sorry: I really wish I could be more help.

Yours,

Frustrated author.

Post-Script. It’s been pointed out below that you can order copies of the UK editions for anywhere in the world from The Book Depository. Shipping is free (or included in the price anyway) to most countries.

Some time has passed since the events of the Thief-Taker’s Apprentice. Berren’s being taught to read and write during the day, a process as painful to his teachers as it is to him, and how to fight with a wooden sword in the evenings when the thief-taker isn’t bodyguarding passing drunkard princes. If you’ve read The Thief-Taker’s Apprentice then you’ll know that the thief-taker most definitely has a murky past and possibly an even murkier friend. Well here it comes.

The thief-taker and his lad had, if I read the internet right, a small but quite enthusiastic readership. I hope you all like this as much as the first one. Of all the books I’ve written so far, this one gave me the most trouble but I think my editor and I between us have beaten out the flaws and polished up a gem to equal the first one if not better it. I hope you like it. It does have a bit of a cliffhanger ending but the third book in the series is out in October – the proofs arrived for me to do yesterday – so the wait isn’t so long.

The Warlock’s Shadow is only available in the UK, Australia and New Zealand (I think). It’s certainly not available in the US except as an import and so far I haven’t found anyone who can tell me how to get it as an ebook in the US either. There doesn’t seem to be much I can do about this and posting copies out to the US costs most than the book itself. What I can do is offer a couple up to give away. As with all the others, comment on this post saying something like “me me me” and I’ll randomly choose two ‘winners.’ The different this time is that for one of the copies I’m ONLY going to randomly choose among people who comment from countries where the book isn’t available – so if that’s the case, say so (otherwise I won’t know and you won’t go in the second pot). Everyone who comments gets a crack at the second copy.

And….. go!

He tried not to look but he couldn’t resist. Three men had come in together. He couldn’t make out much through the press of his regulars but they had an air to them, the sort that said they were used to trouble. They didn’t look like they were local, either. Not city folk. Most likely they were sailors up from the docks, although the Barrow of Beer was closer to the market side of the Maze and not many sailors made it this far. The taverns and the Moongrass dens and the brothels and the muggers and the press-gangs saw to that.

The three of them settled into a corner near the door, crowding tightly onto wooden stools around a tiny table. An unspoken accommodation was reached and the mood in the Barrow sighed and relaxed back to its usual loudness. Three men who were used to trouble, but they weren’t here looking for it here and that was all that mattered. Kasmin finished what he was doing, wiping empty tankards and poured a couple more. Most of the men in here passed as friends, people who’d been coming to the Barrow for years. They were his family, his safe place. He took comfort from that. Strangers made him uneasy. He hadn’t always kept a tavern.

That done, he did what was expected of him and wandered across the floor, easing himself between the knots of drinkers until he reached the three strangers by the door.

“Evening, gentlemen . . .”

His words froze in his mouth. He’d never seen two of them before, but the third . . . the third he knew all right. It was a face ten years older than when he’d last seen it, but there was no mistake. If Kasmin had had a sword with him, there would have been a fight, right there and then, and one of them would have been dead.

He didn’t have a sword though and the three men had knives. Long curved knives, a sort he knew all too well. They were looking at him blankly, wondering what was wrong with him. The man he wanted to kill didn’t remember him!

“Ale or wine?” he asked brusquely.

The man he wanted to kill spat on the floor. “Wine.”

The voice. He remembered that voice, too. Shouting out orders across the deck of a ship and swearing murder over a narrow gap of sea. Kasmin had sworn something back, something about revenge.

“Wine.” He gave them a curt nod and pushed his way back to the other end of the tavern, almost stumbling in his own house. There was a fury inside him now, a rage he hadn’t felt for – how long had the emperor sat on the throne of Varr? Eleven years now? That long and a couple of years more. A killing rage. His hands were shaking. Men who’d known him for years were looking at him, brows furrowed.

“You all right, Kas?”

He shook them away and steadied himself, then took a bottle of wine and three cups from a shelf. He looked at the secret place where he kept his own long curved knife, exactly like the ones the three men had their hips. He hadn’t used it, not in anger, not for the same number of years since he’d felt this fury, but he still knew how. Straight into the neck of one of them, into the face of the second . . .

And and then the third man, the one with his back to the wall, the one sat in the corner with the table in front of him, the one Kasmin really wanted to kill, he’d be upon his feet by then, blade drawn and ready for a fight. It wouldn’t take much to go wrong for Kasmin to be the one who came off worse from that.

His eyes left the knife. He took a deep breath. There were other ways. Syannis – he’d have to tell Syannis. Then there would be blood, no two ways about it. Syannis would come like a hurricane and carve them into pieces.
He wormed his way back to their table and put the cups and the bottle down in front of them. “Half a crown.”
The man he wanted to kill tipped a handful of pennies out of his purse. Kasmin counted them. Too many. He left a couple behind. The man was watching him, peering at him, looking too hard for comfort.

“Better be good this,” he grunted. “Came here special we did. You must be right friendly with that weird old fellow down by the river. Said this was the best place in the Maze for a drink. Don’t look it.”

Kasmin shrugged. He took his pennies and backed away. So the witch-doctor had sent them here. Saffran Kuy, another refugee from a kingdom that didn’t exist any more. Syannis and Kuy, the thief-taker who hadn’t always been a thief-taker, the witch-doctor who hadn’t always been a witch-doctor. And him, the tavern-keeper who’d once been a soldier. They’d all come here because it was far, far away, because they had no home and nowhere was safe any more, and it was all thanks to one man. Radek of Kalda.

And here, sitting in the corner of Kasmin’s tavern was The Headsman. One of Radek’s lieutenants. The one Kasmin hated the most.

Read an excerpt here.

First review up was Liviu Suciu at the Fantasy Book Critic: “…a highly recommended novel that stands well on its own until the cliffhanger ending…” I Thank you, Liviu. I do try to avoid cliffhangers, but the temptation overwhelmed me on this occasion!

Next up, LEC Book reviews: “Dragon-monks, assassins, necromancy and enemies long-forgotten are all at the rendez-vous in this greatly entertaining novel.”

“…a lovely relaxed storytelling style…” Lowly’s Book Blog

This is such a great little series that requires little time and investment for a great return so I recommend it to all fantasy fans! Fixed on Fantasy

So apart from the nail-biting, that’s that.I’d post an excerpt, except I already did that. So here’s a tiny tiny snippet of the next book to come out instead: The Warlock’s Shadow.

Sailors swaggered back and forth, some of them bleary-eyed from a sleepless night in one of the drinking holes that filled the darker alleys beyond. A line of burly men had formed a human chain, picking up sacks and crates from boats drawn up against the edge of the harbour and passing them along to a milling cluster of carts. Further along the waterfront, another chain was passing supplies across the dockside from a warehouse out onto a cluster of jetties. A party of black-skinned Taiytakei traders in their rainbow robes and their bright feathers walked serenely out from the Avenue of Emperors, discretely escorted by half a dozen snuffers to keep the worst of the riff-raff at bay. A squad of imperial soldiers lounged around a covered wagon. Yellow and silver robed priests of the sun and the moon walked side by side, the faithful and the desperate following in their wake like the tail of a comet. Gangs of rough men, press-gangs, lurked by the dockside flophouses like sand-spiders waiting to pounce. Boys ran weaving between them all, carrying news and messages, or else simply mischief. Berren smiled to himself. He could never quite shake the feeling of coming home whenever he visited the docks.

In the meantime, here’s a couple of tasters for your amusement: For the Order of the Scales and for The Warlock’s Shadow. Enjoy.

King of the Crags hit the Ranting Dragon’s best of 2010 list! Hurrah!

Now what?

OK, it’s not the final cover, which won’t have the quote from Joe on it. But I’m an impatient man and bored of waiting for the final cover art (pokes editor gently with a stick. But only gently because I’ve just missed a deadline…)

WHAT? MISSED A DEADLINE? WHAT KIND OF AUTHOR DOES THAT?

A very shame-faced one in this case, because it’s all my own fault. All I can say to anyone else out there who might one day find themselves in the same position is DON’T assume the manuscript you wrote six months ago is ‘fine and just needs a bit of touching up’ and leave looking at it again until a month before it’s due for submission.

The good(ish) news is that The Warlock’s Shadow will only be about two weeks late on my editor’s desk, at which point I can go back to poking him with a large stick instead. About things like THE FINISHED COVER ART FOR ORDER OF THE SCALES,DAMMIT! (although actually, we should all feel a little sorry for the man, as he’s had to pick up a load of extra authors on top of the too much work he already had, and I dare say a lot of them are every bit as annoying as I am).

In more dragony news, the rewrites for Order of the Scales are going fine and the first complete draft for The Black Mausoleum is now sitting on my laptop. Hmmm. Won’t put off those rewrites quite as long with this one.

There are some other changes coming for 2011. I’m thinking of some slightly different content. I’ll try not to be boring, but, tempting as it is to go into detail as to whether the VAT is or isn’t a regressive tax, frankly I’m not that interested, and I suspect that goes the same for most of the people who actually read this. And it would be a huge piece of work. And then we’d get into arguments that would drag on for ages, and I’ll disagree with you about stuff you believe in passionately because the foundations of almost every argument made either way are built on the sand of dodgy statistics, and if there’s one thing that really gets my goat, it’s dodgy statistics… There, see, ranting already!

<Runs off. Has cold shower. Comes back>

No. Expect the occasional post about Star Wars, gaming, and how five-year-old children absolutely understand Munchkin in a way it takes a mature adult years to learn.

Finally, 2010 ended with a couple of rather nice reviews for King of the Crags, anticipating (perhaps) its forthcoming US release.

“Stephen Deas has combined all that’s good in fantasy and spun it around in a thriller-paced tale that will leave you breathless.” The Ranting Dragon.

“Prince Jehal … is brilliant. One of the most complex, twisted and ultimately human characters I’ve read … When I think back over what I’ve read this year … I’m hard pressed to find one I enjoyed more than this one.” SF Crowsnest

Happy New Year!