Shadow of Empire, the first novel in Jay Allen’s Far Stars Trilogy, opens with Captain Blackhawk stripped to the waist on a hostile planet, armed with a shortsword, facing off against a 9-foot monster in an alien arena. That pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the tone and target audience for this series — it’s a straight ahead, unapologetic space adventure, with a protagonist who commands a ship called the Wolf’s Claw, and whose “eyes focus like twin lasers” in combat.

Jay Allen is one of the most successful of a new generation of authors who, like Vaughn Heppner, Michael Anderle, and others, skirted traditional publishing and found an audience self-publishing digital books. His Crimson Worlds series includes 9 titles, and has sold over 800,000 copies in digital format. The Far Stars Trilogy looks like Allan’s first foray into traditional publishing, but it’s not his last — his latest book, Flames of Rebellion, the start of a brand new military adventure series, arrived in trade paperback from Harper Voyager on March 21.

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Here’s the back covers for all three books.

Ad here’s the complete publishing details.

Shadow of Empire (366 pages, $15.99 trade paperback/$3.99 digital, November 3, 2015)
Enemy in the Dark (433 pages, $15.99 trade paperback/$4.99 digital, December 1, 2015)
Funeral Games (457 pages, $15.99 trade paperback/$5.99 digital, January 19, 2016)

All three volumes were published by Harper Voyager, with covers by Marc Simonetti. Although it’s not obvious from the cover art, the books fit together to make a single piece of art. Here’s Simonetti’s original huge triptych, which was chopped up to make all three covers.

Read an except from the opening of Shadow of Empire at the B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog.

See all of our coverage of the best new Series Fantasy here.