Exclusive Cover Reveal & Teaser: The Nine by Tracy Townsend

Today I am thrilled to present to you an exclusive cover reveal and teaser for this exciting epic fantasy, to be released from Pyr Books later this Fall on November 14, 2017! Say hello to The Nine by Tracy Townsend, a debut about a self-scribing book that might be the key to the universe and the dangerous price people are willing to pay to learn its secrets. It is described as a dark heist story, and I also have it on good authority that it is perfect for fans of novels in the same vein as A Darker Shade of Magic and The Lies of Locke Lamora!

Gah, I want it! Heist stories are totally up my alley, as you know. But all right, enough gushing from me, here is the cover in all its glory:

A book that some would kill for…

Black market courier Rowena Downshire is doing everything she can to stay off the streets and earn enough to pay her mother’s way to freedom. But an urgent and unexpected delivery leads her face to face with a creature out of nightmares.

The Alchemist knows things few men have lived to tell about, but when a frightened and empty-handed courier shows up on his doorstep he knows better than to turn her away. What he discovers leads him to ask for help from the last man he wants to see–the former mercenary, Anselm Meteron. 

Reverend Phillip Chalmers awakes in a cell, bloodied and bruised, facing a creature twice his size. Translating a stolen book that writes itself may be his only hope for survival; however, he soon learns the text may have been written by the Creator himself, tracking the nine human subjects of his Grand Experiment. In the wrong hands, it could mean the end of humanity.

This unlikely team must try to keep the book from those who would misuse it. But how can they be sure who the enemy is when they can barely trust each other? And what will happen to them when it reveals a secret no human was meant to know?

Seven times in seven years of courier work, Rowena Downshire had been robbed. With each experience she’d learned a little more about how to sense the next coming.

Rowena looked to her right and saw a hulking shape slip free of an alley’s shadows, not far from the lowstreet path. There was no mistaking its hunched shoulders, or its curious, high-stepping gait.

The aigamuxa raised its left leg and held it aloft. The pink eye on its heel seemed to stare right through Rowena, slicing skin and muscle, bone and sinew.

Rowena closed both hands around the satchel’s straps. She tightened them slowly.

And then she turned heel toward the north-east, taking the stairs to the highstreets three at a time, scrabbling with her fingers as her feet slipped.

She was at the first summit and running. From somewhere below, she could hear the aigamuxa’s furious bellow.

The fear left Rowena almost as quickly as it had come. She had her wind and felt good. The aigamuxa were worse than bad runners, all but blind with both feet on the ground. They were confined to a plodding pace to keep from careening into walls or stamping through some debris that would grind into their eyes.

The alchemical lampposts flashed by Rowena’s head, one after another. When she passed the sixth, she realized the flashing movement in the corner of her eye wasn’t from her own passage into and out of pools of light.

It was from the aigamuxa swinging in the upper reaches of the street above her.

November can’t come soon enough. Happily, The Nine is now available to preorder on Amazon, and don’t forget to also add the book on Goodreads! What do you think of the cover and description? Tell me your thoughts!