The new book is out. The Zanari Inheritance is available on Smashwords now and Amazon soon. Apple iBooks, B&N, etc will follow when they’ve done their vetting thing.
Sorry to have been a bit silent about this one coming, but the last few weeks have been… interesting, and busy. I’ll post some more about this book and series in the near future, but in the meantime, I hope you enjoy it.
Witches and Ray-Guns 
Available on Amazon U.K. 😀
And Amazon DE.
Protagonist looks a bit different from your “usual type”; I like. Blurb sounds a bit generic (it’s always smugglers!), but I’ll give it a try.
This one has more than one protagonist, in a way. And I wouldn’t take the blurb’s word for exactly what’s going on. Blurbs are… generally inexact.
I normally don’t really bother with reading much of the blurb of your novels; maybe glance over it. It’s not important for me personally (and I suspect most of your other blog readers 😉 ).
It was more a comment along the lines of “but would a new reader find that interesting?” I expected a bit more of a “hook”, I think.
But mostly it was just an idle thought.
So there!
First immediate evaluation is positive. Liked the characters, nice worldbuilding.
Now why am I reminded of the old anime “Towards the Terra”? 😛
Honestly, I don’t know because I don’t know that anime. 🙂
I bought it and started reading immediately after I saw this post.
Even the first scene hooked me, I’m now a quarter into the book and I still like it. Unfortunately 🙂 the cast is again very estrogen-oriented. I still wait for a book from you with a strong male protagonist. Jay is the by far weakest character for now.
True, but personally as a male reader the first thing I look for in a book is a strong female protagonist 😀
I don’t really want to give anything away, but Jay is a little more complex than he first appears.
However, this is a fairly female-centric book. Unless you count Geogracus.
The thing I’m working on right now (which may or may not actually happen) is worse: I’ve barely managed to get a male character into the first 11,000 words. There is a reason for that. I’m not actually trying to get rid of all the men.
The way Jay was added was kinda weak, in my opinion anyway. Just randomly bumped into him; fine, coincidences happen, but then he tags along as a matter of course – why would anyone accept that? His job was basically done when he got Kaya into contact with the smugglers.
Having finished the book in the meantime, I understand the “more complex” thing, but he was rather bland throughout the book. Unfortunately going into details would absolutely spoil everything.
If there is an understandable reason for the cast I can go with it; here I didn’t see such a reason.
I always enjoy a lot of the books you write, because they have the strong female hero[s]. for me i am more apt to ignore a male. 🙂
sorry has a computer crash and lost most of my links an PWs buying it now
Ok Bought, next book in the queue. Very happy to see a new book out.
Overall I like the setting of this book very much. It’s a hilariously shaped new world. I wonder why you never mentioned working on that world up to now.
I personally don’t like the body count in that book, may other readers most likely will, but I’d prefer less bloodshed. Along that line I also didn’t really like that really proverbial “trigger-happy” character; it’s much too over the top for my taste.
I do like that while some of those characters are close to superheroes from their skills, you also introduced their “kryptonite” in a very drastic way.
I didn’t mention that I was developing this series because… Well, I’ve been saying ‘this is coming’ a lot recently and then having to back down on it because something’s come up and blocked me. That’s partially why this one was done at this point: I needed something new to work on to jar me out of the rut I’d got into. If it had turned out to be a dead end, I’d have been annoyed with myself to be saying ‘this is coming… oh, it’s not,’ again.
Meanwhile, things are settling down at home, and I should be more or less back on my normal schedule soon. Here’s hoping anyway.
Thank you, Niall. Started and finished yesterday. I enjoyed it very much. Good characters, plenty of setup for more stories and for character development, but a good story in its own right. The only aspect I didn’t like was the acknowledged double coincidence of Jay’s meeting with Kaya and then falling in with the Zanari.
I look forward to more in this series. I definitely want to see how Kaya develops and to learn Sienna’s back story.
I could have done more to explain the coincidences, but… Well, spoilers.
The next planned book in the series will actually go into Sienna’s background, so you get your wish. Not sure when it’s happening, but I’d expect it this year.
🙂
Another awesome book. ^_^ I hope we see more of this series soon.
Love Jinny. While previous posts are not untrue, I think she’s absolutely adorable. God help us if she ever discovers ” The Archives of Quentin Tarantino”
Just finshed reading this. I can’t wait for the next.
Just a minor issue that I wanted to point out.. you used the word “small nuke” and 2.5MT in the same sentence. 🙂 FWIW, 5MT are the “big boys” and generally the military expects 100-500KT to be the most useful. (seeding a “net” of small devices over a target area is far more effective) That won’t change even in the future – too big of a device just adds radiation without destroying much more. (its a logarithmic effect with atmosphere)
Yeah, its not important — but I took a course once on Nuclear damage/hazard/effect mapping… Even assuming the future can easily make nukes just means a LOT of small ones is more likely for what they were doing.