Black Gate

You know how we love to mix genres here at Black Gate. A Lovely Way to Burn, on sale in trade paperback next week from Quercus Books, looks like a fine example of one of my favorite modern concoctions: the apocalyptic mystery. As hospitals begin to fill with the dead and dying, Stevie Flint is convinced the sudden death of her boyfriend, Dr. Simon Sharkey, was not from natural causes. As the exits from London become choked with people fleeing a deadly new plague, Stevie’s search for answers take her in the opposite direction, into the very heart of the dying city.

Louise Welsh is also the author of The Bullet Trick, The Girl on the Stairs, and The Cutting Room. A Lovely Way to Burn is the opening novel in her Plague Tales trilogy. The second volume, Death is a Welcome Guest, arrives on May 3, and the third and final nstallment, No Dominion, will be published in January of next year.

Like this new genre of apocalyptic mysteries? You might also want to check out Lev AC Rosen’s Depth and Ben H. Winters’ The Last Policeman.

A Lovely Way to Burn will be published by Quercus on April 5, 2016. It is 318 pages, priced at $14.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by More Visual Limited.

In her review of Irenicon, the opening novel in Aidan Harte’s Wave Trilogy, Sarah Avery wrote:

Welcome to Rasenna, a shining city-state turned failed state, where river spirits haunt the streets and mistake themselves for the citizens they’ve drowned. Rasenna’s people hide in their towers at night, and even by day fear the river their enemy wielded to cut their city in two…. Can a city recover from two decades of grief, madness, and self-destruction? Can these people change in time to save themselves? They’d better, because the rival city of sorcerous Engineers that smashed them before may well do so again…

Aidan Harte has been justly praised for his world-building in his debut novel. Irenicon is, almost, what we might get if Italo Calvino’s classic Invisible Cities had lingered for a few hundred pages in one of its gem-perfect vignettes… Irenicon would make a perfect action film. Aidan Harte gives us a pretty good view of the movie he must have seen in his mind while he was writing. The flashing banners of Rasenna’s homegrown martial art, the glorious decay of a city that breeds endless tension, the disturbing chill of Concord’s purity and the darkness at its foundation, and (oh my!) the uncanny otherness of the river spirits could be the making of a summer blockbuster.

Sounded pretty dang good to me, but I resisted the urge to dive in right away. Partly because I gave Sarah our only review copy. But mostly because these days I avoid trilogies until I can hold all three titles in my greedy little hands. That resolution became harder and harder to keep as the accolades continued to pile up (click on the back cover of the third volume, at right, for some examples). But my long wait is finally over. The Warring States, the second volume, was published on April 7, 2015, and the final book, Spira Mirabilis, will be released in two weeks… and our review copy arrived last week. Interns, hold all my calls. I’m on assignment.

Spira Mirabilis will be published by Jo Fletcher Books on April 5, 2016. It is 522 pages, priced at $26.99 in hardcover. The cover is by Ghost.