The View From Monday - October 22, 2018

Happy Monday!

There is 1 debut this week:

A Conspiracy of Truths by Alexandra Rowland.

Clicking on a novel's cover will take you to its Amazon page.

From formerly featured DAC Authors:

The Case of the Hidden Daemon (Dr Ribero's Agency of the Supernatural 3) by Lucy Banks;

Iron Gold (Red Rising 4) by Pierce Brown is out in Trade Paperback;

Roar of Sky (Blood of Earth 3) by Beth Cato;

and

The Silver Scar by Betsy Dornbusch.

Clicking on a novel's cover will take you to its Amazon page.

Debut novels are highlighted in blue. Novels, etc. by formerly featured DAC Authors are highlighted in green.

October 22, 2018

TITLE	AUTHOR	SERIES
Lost Mars: Stories from the Golden Age of the Red Planet	Mike Ashley (Ed)	SF - Collection

October 23, 2018

TITLE	AUTHOR	SERIES
Slender Man	Anonymous	SupTh
Restless Lightning	Richard Baker	SF - Breaker of Empires 2
The Case of the Hidden Daemon	Lucy Banks	PCM - Dr Ribero's Agency of the Supernatural 3
Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles An Alphabettery	Becket Anne Rice	Occ/Sup/P/SupTh
Immortal Life: A Soon To Be True Story (h2tp)	Stanley Bing	SF
The Dream Gatherer	Kristen Britain	F/FR - Green Rider
Iron Gold (h2tp)	Pierce Brown	SF/Dys - Red Rising 4
Cold Iron	Miles Cameron	F/HistF - Masters & Mages 1
Roar of Sky	Beth Cato	HistF - Blood of Earth 3
Damned by the Ancients	Catherine Cavendish	H - Nemesis of the Gods 3
The Silver Scar	Betsy Dornbusch	F/DF
The Guardian	Sarah Fine	UF - The Immortal Dealers 2
Hark! The Herald Angels Scream	Christopher Golden (Ed)	H/Occ/Sup - Anthology
American Ghost (h2tp)	Paul Guernsey	GH/Occ/Sup/F/CF
Pulse	Michael Harvey	Cr
Virtual Sabotage	Julie Hyzy	Sus
No Sleep till Doomsday	Laurence MacNaughton	UF/HU/FR - A Dru Jasper Novel 3
Best British Horror 2018	John Mains (Ed)	H - Anthology
Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker (h2tp)	Gregory Maguire	LF
Eternal Sonata: A Thriller of the Near Future (h2tp)	Jamie Metzl	MedTh
Thin Air	Richard K. Morgan	SF/TechTh/HSF
Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction	Alec Nevala-Lee	Biography
The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School	Kim Newman	F/H/SupTh
The Geeky Chef Drinks: Unofficial Cocktail Recipes from Game of Thrones, Legend of Zelda, Star Trek, and More	Cassandra Reeder	Cookbooks
The Making of Planet of the Apes	Jonathan Rinzler	PerfArts
Red Moon	Kim Stanley Robinson	SF/SO/HSF
Fallout: The Vault Dweller's Official Cookbook	Victoria Rosenthal	Cookbooks
A Conspiracy of Truths (D)	Alexandra Rowland	F
The Devil's Fingers (e)	Hunter Shea	H - Hunter Shea: One Size Eats All 3
The Scent of Tears	Adrian Tchaikovsky  et al.	F - Tales of the Apt 4
The Great Tales of Middle-earth: Children of Húrin, Beren and Lúthien, and The Fall of Gondolin	J.R.R. Tolkien Christopher Tolkien (Ed)	F
Sin du Jour: The Final Course (e)	Matt Wallace	UF/HU - A Sin du Jour Affair Omnibus
Dungeons and Dragons Art and Arcana [Special Edition, Boxed Book & Ephemera Set]: A Visual History	Michael Witwer Kyle Newman Jon Peterson Sam Witwer	F/Role Playing
Dungeons and Dragons Art and Arcana: A Visual History	Michael Witwer Kyle Newman Jon Peterson Sam Witwer	F/Role Playing
The Art of Magic: The Gathering: Concepts & Legends	James Wyatt	F/Role Playing - The Art of Magic: The Gathering

October 25, 2018

TITLE	AUTHOR	SERIES
Doctor Who: The Good Doctor (e)	Juno Dawson	SF - Doctor Who

October 26, 2018

TITLE	AUTHOR	SERIES
Science Fiction - The Evolutionary Mythology of the Future: Prometheus to the Martians (e)	Thomas Lombardo	LC/SocSc/Psy

D - Debut
e - eBook
Ed - Editor
h2mm - Hardcover to Mass Market Paperback
h2tp - Hardcover to Trade Paperback
Il - Illustrator
ri - reissue or reprint
tp2mm - Trade Paperback to Mass Market Paperback
Tr - Translator



AC - Alien Contact
AH - Alternate History
Anthro - Anthropology
AP - Apocalyptic
CF - Contemporary Fantasy
CoA - Coming of Age
Cr - Crime
CW - Contemporary Woman
CyP - Cyberpunk
DF - Dark Fantasy
Dys - Dystopian
F - Fantasy
FairyT - Fairy Tales
FL - Family Life
FolkT - Folk Tales
FR - Fantasy Romance
GenEng - Genetic Engineering
GH - Ghost(s)
GN - Graphic Novel
Gothic - Gothic
H - Horror
Hist - Historical
HistF - Historical Fantasy
Hist M - Historical Mystery
Hist R - Historical Romance
HistTh - Historical Thriller
HSF - Hard Science Fiction
HU - Humor
LC - Literary Criticism
LF - Literary Fiction
LM - Legend and Mythology
MedTh - Medical Thriller
MR - Magical Realism
MTI - Media Tie-In
Occ - Occult
P - Paranormal
PA - Post Apocalyptic
PCM - Parnormal Cozy Mystery
PerfArts - Performing Arts
PNR - Paranormal Romance
Pol - Political
PolTh - Political Thriller
PopCul - Popular Culture
Sc - Science
SE - Space Exploration
SF - Science Fiction
SFR - Science Fiction Romance
SH - Superheroes
SO - Space Opera
SocHist - Social History
SocSc - Social Science
SP - Steampunk
SpecFic - Speculative Fiction
SS - Short Stories
Sup - Supernatural
SupTh - Supernatural Thriller
Sus - Suspense
TechTh - Technological Thriller
Th - Thriller
TT - Time Travel
UF - Urban Fantasy

Note: Not all genres and formats are found in the books, etc. listed above.

2018 Debut Author Challenge Cover Wars - October Debuts

Each month you will be able to vote for your favorite cover from that month's debut novels. At the end of the year the 12 monthly winners will be pitted against each other to choose the 2018 Debut Novel Cover of the Year. Please note that a debut novel cover is eligible in the month in which the novel is published in the US. Cover artist/illustrator/designer information is provided when we have it.

I'm using PollCode for this vote. After you the check the circle next to your favorite, click "Vote" to record your vote. If you'd like to see the real-time results click "View". This will take you to the PollCode site where you may see the results. If you want to come back to The Qwillery click "Back" and you will return to this page. Voting will end sometime on October 31, 2018, unless the vote is extended. If the vote is extended the ending date will be updated.

Vote for your favorite October 2018 Debut Cover!

The Allfather Paradox

A Conspiracy of Truths

Mage Against the Machine

The Oyster Thief

The Quantum Magician

Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return

Strange Ink

The Witch of Willow Hall

Zero Sum Game

 

pollcode.com free polls

Cover illustration by Jeremy D. Mohler

Book design by Nick Sciacca

Jacket illustration copyright © 2018 by Marko Manev

Jacket design by Nicholas Sciacca

Cover art by Justin Adams

Cover design by Kyle G. Hunter

TV test pattern on cover © Donald Sawvel/Shutterstock.com

Silhouette images on cover © iStock.com/majvecka

Skull illustration © Studio London

Cover design by Mary Luna

2018 Debut Author Challenge - October Debuts

There are 9 debut novels for October.

Please note that we use the publisher's publication date in the United States, not copyright dates or non-US publication dates.

The October debut authors and their novels are listed in alphabetical order by author (not book title or publication date). Take a good look at the covers. Voting for your favorite October cover for the 2018 Debut Author Challenge Cover Wars will take place starting on October 15, 2018.

If you are participating as a reader in the Challenge, please let us know in the comments what you are thinking of reading or email us at "DAC . TheQwillery @ gmail . com" (remove the spaces and quotation marks). Please note that we list all debuts for the month (of which we are aware), but not all of these authors will be 2018 Debut Author Challenge featured authors. However, any of these novels may be read by Challenge readers to meet the goal for October 2018. The list is correct as of the day posted.

Shaun Barger

Mage Against the Machine
Saga Press, October 30, 2018
Hardcover and eBook, 512 pages

Harry Potter meets The Terminator in this action-packed adventure about a young man who discovers that everything he believed about his world is a lie.

The year is 2120. The humans are dead. The mages have retreated from the world after a madman blew up civilization with weaponized magical technology. Safe within domes that protect them from the nuclear wasteland on the other side, the mages have spent the last century putting their lives back together.

Nikolai is obsessed with artifacts from twentieth-century human life: mage-crafted replica Chuck Taylors on his feet, Schwarzenegger posters on his walls, Beatlemania still alive and well in his head. But he’s also tasked with a higher calling—to maintain the Veils that protect mage-kind from the hazards of the wastes beyond. As a cadet in the Mage King’s army, Nik has finally found what he always wanted—a purpose. But when confronted by one of his former instructors gone rogue, Nik tumbles into a dark secret. The humans weren’t nuked into oblivion—they’re still alive. Not only that, outside the domes a war rages between the last enclaves of free humans and vast machine intelligences.

Outside the dome, unprepared and on the run, Nik finds Jem. Jem is a Runner for the Human Resistance. A ballerina-turned-soldier by the circumstances of war, Jem is more than just a human—her cybernetic enhancement mods make her faster, smarter, and are the only things that give her a fighting chance against the artificial beings bent on humanity’s eradication.

Now Nik faces an impossible decision: side with the mages and let humanity die out? Or stand with Jem and the humans—and risk endangering everything he knows and loves?

Amazon : Barnes and Noble : Book Depository : Books-A-Million : IndieBound

Google Play : Kobo

Sonia Faruqi

The Oyster Thief
Pegasus Books, October 16, 2018
Hardcover and eBook, 304 pages

Two worlds collide when a mermaid and human man meet, plunging readers into a vast underwater realm brimming with adventure and intrigue.

"The mermaid’s scales were bronze, and they shimmered like hundreds of pennies arranged close together. Her immense blue-green eyes gave a look of fragility to her face, yet he found her eyes unsettling. She was leaning against a thirty-foot-long shark, which emerged from behind her and opened its mouth to reveal a great big cavern lined with hundreds of teeth—a black tunnel ready to swallow him."

Coralline is a mermaid who is engaged to the merman of her dreams. But when an oil spill wreaks havoc on her idyllic village life, her little brother falls gravely ill. Desperate to save him, she embarks on aquest to find a legendary elixir made of starlight.

Izar, a human man, is on the cusp of an invention that will enable him to mine the depths of the ocean. His discovery will soon make him the richest man on earth—while threatening merpeople with extinction. But then, suddenly, Izar finds himself transformed into a merman and caught in a web of betrayal and intrigue. Meeting Coralline in the ocean, he decides to join her on her quest for the elixir, hoping it will turn him human again.

The quest pushes Coralline and Izar together, even though their worlds are at odds. Their pasts threaten to tear them apart, while a growing attraction adds to the danger. Ultimately, each of them faces an impossible choice. Should Coralline leave her fiancé for a man who might betray her? And Izar has a dark secret of his own—one that could cause him to lose Coralline forever.

Magnificent and moving, set against a breathtaking ocean landscape, The Oyster Thief is a richly imagined odyssey destined to become a classic.

Amazon : Barnes and Noble : Book Depository : Books-A-Million : IndieBound

Google Play : iBooks

Hester Fox

The Witch of Willow Hall
Graydon House, October 2, 2018
Trade Paperback and eBook, 368 pages

Two centuries after the Salem witch trials, there’s still one witch left in Massachusetts. But she doesn’t even know it.

Take this as a warning: if you are not able or willing to control yourself, it will not only be you who suffers the consequences, but those around you, as well.

New Oldbury, 1821

In the wake of a scandal, the Montrose family and their three daughters—Catherine, Lydia and Emeline—flee Boston for their new country home, Willow Hall.

The estate seems sleepy and idyllic. But a subtle menace creeps into the atmosphere, remnants of a dark history that call to Lydia, and to the youngest, Emeline.

All three daughters will be irrevocably changed by what follows, but none more than Lydia, who must draw on a power she never knew she possessed if she wants to protect those she loves. For Willow Hall’s secrets will rise, in the end…

Amazon : Barnes and Noble : Book Depository : Books-A-Million : IndieBound

Google Play : iBooks : Kobo

S.L. Huang

Zero Sum Game
Cas Russell 1
Tor Books, October 2, 2018
Hardcover and eBook, 336 pages

A blockbuster, near-future science fiction thriller, S.L. Huang's Zero Sum Game introduces a math-genius mercenary who finds herself being manipulated by someone possessing unimaginable power…

Cas Russell is good at math. Scary good. The vector calculus blazing through her head lets her smash through armed men twice her size and dodge every bullet in a gunfight, and she'll take any job for the right price.

As far as Cas knows, she’s the only person around with a superpower...until she discovers someone with a power even more dangerous than her own. Someone who can reach directly into people’s minds and twist their brains into Moebius strips. Someone intent on becoming the world’s puppet master.

Cas should run, like she usually does, but for once she's involved. There’s only one problem...

She doesn’t know which of her thoughts are her own anymore.

Amazon : Barnes and Noble : Book Depository : Books-A-Million : IndieBound

Google Play : iBooks : Kobo

Gary Kemble

Strange Ink
Titan Books, October 9, 2018
Trade Paperback and eBook

Spine-chilling horror in the vein of Joe Hill. After moving into a new house, journalist Harry Hendrick wakes up with tattoos that aren’t his…

When washed-up journalist Harry Hendrick wakes one morning with a hangover and a strange symbol tattooed on his neck, he shrugs it off as a bad night out. But soon more tattoos appear: grisly, violent images which come accompanied by horrific nightmares - so he begins to dig deeper. Harry’s search leads him to a sinister disappearance, torment from beyond the grave, and a web of corruption and violence tangled with his own past. One way or another, he has to right the wrongs.

Amazon : Barnes and Noble : Book Depository : Books-A-Million : IndieBound

Google Play : iBooks : Kobo

Derek Künsken

The Quantum Magician
The Quantum Evolution 1
Solaris, October 2, 2018
Trade Paperback and eBook, 480 pages

The breathtaking debut from acclaimed short story writer Derek Künsken.

THE ULTIMATE HEIST

Belisarius is a Homo quantus, engineered with impossible insight. But his gift is also a curse—an uncontrollable, even suicidal drive to know, to understand. Genetically flawed, he leaves his people to find a different life, and ends up becoming the galaxy’s greatest con man and thief.

But the jobs are getting too easy and his extraordinary brain is chafing at the neglect. When a client offers him untold wealth to move a squadron of secret warships across an enemy wormhole, Belisarius jumps at it. Now he must embrace his true nature to pull off the job, alongside a crew of extraordinary men and women.

If he succeeds, he could trigger an interstellar war… or the next step in human evolution.

Amazon : Barnes and Noble : Book Depository : Books-A-Million : IndieBound

Google Play : iBooks : Kobo

Martin Riker

Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return
Coffee House Press, October 9, 2018
Trade Paperback and eBook, 256 pages

After he dies, Samuel Johnson inhabits one body after the next, waiting for a chance to return to his son.

When Samuel Johnson dies, he finds himself in the body of the man who killed him, unable to depart this world but determined, at least, to return to the son he left behind. Moving from body to body as each one expires, Samuel’s soul journeys on a comic quest through an American half-century, inhabiting lives as stymied, in their ways, as his own. A ghost story of the most unexpected sort, Martin Riker’s extraordinary debut is about the ways experience is mediated, the unstoppable drive for human connection, and the struggle to be more fully alive in the world.

Amazon : Barnes and Noble : Book Depository : Books-A-Million : IndieBound

Google Play : iBooks : Kobo

Alexandra Rowland

A Conspiracy of Truths
Saga Press, October 23, 2018
Hardcover and eBook, 464 pages

A wrongfully imprisoned storyteller spins stories from his jail cell that just might have the power to save him—and take down his jailers too.

Arrested on accusations of witchcraft and treason, Chant finds himself trapped in a cold, filthy jail cell in a foreign land. With only his advocate, the unhelpful and uninterested Consanza, he quickly finds himself cast as a bargaining chip in a brewing battle between the five rulers of this small, backwards, and petty nation.

Or, at least, that's how he would tell the story.

In truth, Chant has little idea of what is happening outside the walls of his cell, but he must quickly start to unravel the puzzle of his imprisonment before they execute him for his alleged crimes. But Chant is no witch—he is a member of a rare and obscure order of wandering storytellers. With no country to call his home, and no people to claim as his own, all Chant has is his wits and his apprentice, a lad more interested in wooing handsome shepherds than learning the ways of the world.

And yet, he has one great power: his stories in the ears of the rulers determined to prosecute him for betraying a nation he knows next to nothing about. The tales he tells will topple the Queens of Nuryevet and just maybe, save his life.

Amazon : Barnes and Noble : Book Depository : Books-A-Million : IndieBound

Google Play : iBooks : Kobo

Ian Stuart Sharpe

The Allfather Paradox
Vikingverse 1
Outland Entertainment, October 9, 2018
Trade Paperback and eBook, 414 pages

What if an ancient god escaped his fate…and history was thrown to the wolves?

Churchwarden Michaels thought it was just a run-of-the-mill crazy old man who stood in the graveyard, hellbent on studying the thousand-year-old Viking memorial there. But when things start changing and outright disappearing, Michaels realizes there is more to this old man than meets the eye. Now, Michaels finds himself swept up in an ancient god’s quest to escape his destiny by reworking reality, putting history—and to Michaels’s dismay, Christianity itself—to the Viking sword. In this new Vikingverse, storied heroes of mankind emerge in new and brutal guises drawn from the sagas:

A young Norse prince plots to shatter empires and claim the heavens…
A scholar exiled to the frontier braves the dangers of the New World, only to find those “new worlds” are greater than he imagined…
A captured Jötunn plants the dreams of freedom during a worlds-spanning war…
A bold empress discovers there is a price for immortality, one her ancestors have come to collect…

With the timelines stretched to breaking point, it’s up to Churchwarden Michaels to save reality as we know it…

Amazon : Barnes and Noble : Book Depository : Books-A-Million : IndieBound

iBooks : Kobo