Book promo…

Posted on by November 14, 2025

First up is DJ Butler and Aaron Michael Ritchey with the third in his Cunning Man series, The Familiar Spirit

As always, click on the cover for the Amazon link!

The blurb-

A new novel in the Cunning Man series from Dragon Award-nominated author D.J. Butler and Aaron Michael Ritchey.

Cunning man Hiram Woolley and his son Michael carry an itinerant preacher across the border into Mexico. Hiram is haunted by the specter of a bloody-faced man that stalks him in his dreams, but also by doubts about what lies ahead in the Mormon colonies around Nuevo Casas Grandes—this is the country Hiram’s father fled to when he abandoned young Hiram and his mother.

In the colonies, Hiram and Michael are dragged into investigating an impossible murder. They track the killer across a land haunted by robbers, by its history of oppression and revolution, by ancient conflict and modern racial strife, and by the insanity that flows from loneliness and exile. They battle bandits and also an elusive ghostmaster who blights the land with the spirits of the uneasy dead.

But before the killer can be brought to justice, Hiram will learn that the most haunting thing of all is family.

Next up is Raconteur Press with a couple of new anthologies, first is Mercs and Mayhem

The blurb-

We’ve collected eleven stories of mercenaries, spanning a broad range of genres and settings. A group of raiders sneaks into an enemy stronghold to open the way for their fellows, and find it to be very filthy work. An indentured drop trooper stumbles over a treasure of incalculable value, which might still be more trouble than it’s worth. Five soldiers of fortune wonder if what their client wants them to do is too much to risk the stain on their souls. A hyper-corporatized mercenary conglomerate hilariously, and brutally, reduces everything in battle, even blood and souls, into a dollar value.

Enjoy these tales and lift a glass, or say a prayer, for those who wage war for profit. Whether long ago, far in the future, or just yesterday, these soldiers of fortune are honored in these pages.

And the next anthology is Bourbon and Lead

The blurb-

The dames were trouble. I knew that the moment I saw them. But they knew exactly the siren song that would get me to follow.

“Dime Detective Stories,” one of them said.

“And you can pitch it to the scribblers any way you want,” the other purred.

Yeah. I was doomed from the start.

And that’s more or less how this anthology happened. It was held special for me to edit, because my love of the hardboiled school of writing is well known to my friends. But since noir has been covered six ways from Sunday in various RacPress anthos, I chose both to open up the concept a bit, and to reference the kinds of crime and adventure writing I especially love, but which are disreputable and disdained by the same academy that acknowledges (long after his death) the value of Raymond Chandler.

Great reads, and a nice way to pass the weekend!

Comments

Book promo… — 2 Comments

  1. I was just imagining a war waged on a “cost plus” contract.

    It would work out sort of like road construction, or Boeing’s Starliner project.