Over at Pulpwork Press, we’ve hammered out our release schedule for 2012. And you’ll have the chance to pick up not one but two books written by me in the upcoming year!
The first has been long in development. Outlaw Blues is the second book in the Infernum series, which began with the Pulp Ark Award-nominated Love & Bullets in 2010. I actually finished this manuscript a year ago (adding more credence to Richard Lee Byers’ statement that writers live in the future), but we had our schedule full up for 2011.
Outlaw Blues is not really a sequel, per se. The main character is Carl Flint, a former Infernum assassin who’s brought out of retirement by Dante for one last job. The target? Agency operative Christian Pierce, who was one of the main characters in Love & Bullets (and if you’ve read that book, you might be really intrigued already).
There are some characters from Love & Bullets who appear in Outlaw Blues. Naturally, Dante appears, but his role is significantly smaller in comparison to Love & Bullets. Another returning character, and in a much larger role, is Pierce’s partner, Agency operative Julie Kim. Angela Lockhart, the main character of Love & Bullets, does appear, but only in a very small, cameo appearance. Same goes for Dante’s right-hand woman, Tauna. There are also some characters who debut in this book who will play larger roles in future Infernum installments. Such as Johnny Venom, an arms dealer who gained his nom de guerre by specializing in chemical and biological weapons.
Outlaw Blues is scheduled for a January release, which means it will be the first 2012 release from Pulpwork Press. You can see the preliminary cover design, but it’s not quite complete. The PWP insignia is undergoing some tweaks and I’m going to receive the New Pulp insignia very shortly to add to it as well.
My second release for 2012 is Dragon Kings of the Orient. This is the sequel to my most-recent book, the critically-acclaimed The Myth Hunter. This adventure brings back three of the central characters of that adventure back together. Naturally, Elisa Hill is back, since she’s the focus of this series. Her mentor, Professor Maxwell Finch, is also back again. And so is Asami, the shape-changing fox spirit. Lucas Davalos makes a cameo and we meet a new character, Jason Shroud.
This time around, Elisa and Max, at the request of Asami, travel to Hong Kong. Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, has been freed from imprisonment and his targets are the beings who put them there — the four Dragon Kings of China! It’s up to Elisa and her friends to make sure the Dragon Kings escape death. Because if they do go down, environmental chaos will rage in Asia!
Dragon Kings of the Orient is scheduled for release in July.
Following both these two books, I may take a short break from the Infernum and Myth Hunter series. I’m about 10,000 words into a new project and have begun work on what may be the first in a collection of stories featuring a new character set in the mid-40s. It’s still a bit early to talk about either of those, so more on them in the future if they end up panning out.