Friday will be full of launch madness with four launches. Well, two-and-a-half plus relaunches.

Second Strike, is the latest full-length Revenge Squad novel, the urban fantasy/ space opera crossover series set in the worlds of the Human Legion. Like my other launches, it will be initially available at a special launch price.

I might have written the words (and Vincent Sammy painted the picture), but the story belongs to someone else, so I’ll let him explain what it’s about:

It was supposed to be just another job: trash the cargo of a shipping line that had been messing with a Revenge Squad client. Honestly, I hadn’t meant to blow the ship sky high. And when it transpired that the ship was owned by the most powerful man in Port Zahir, and that he blamed us for the damage he’d suffered, it was Revenge Squad’s turn to face revenge.

My name is NJ McCall, and this is the story of how I helped to tear Port Zahir apart, and then tried to stitch it back together… with mixed results. It’s about dark obsessions, corruption in high places, killer droids with attitude, and a city coming apart along racial lines. Along the way, I sing for my life, develop an inappropriate attraction to several civil officials, am recruited by a Legion spy, and get close and personal to a perverted statue.

But most of all, it’s about finding a new family amongst the most unexpected people I could imagine: aliens.

One of the hottest series in military SF right now is the Four Horsemen Universe by Mark Wandrey, Chris Kennedy, and a supporting cast of vagrant ne’er-do-wells (such as myself and JR Handley). The series kicked off with Mark’s excellent Cartwright’s Cavaliers, which was shortlisted for the Dragon Awards a couple of weeks ago. The second anthology of hard-hitting mech merc action is launched by Seventh Seal Press on Friday. For a Few Credits More includes novelettes by me and one co-written by JR Handley with Sleeping Legion series editor, Corey Truax.

There’s a new Revenge Squad novelette launching Friday, exclusively for signed up Legionaries, called Damage Unlimited.

Set in the Naddox Archipelago, some 800 miles from his Revenge Squad base at Port Zahir (and where the gun laws are considerably laxer!), a forestry client activates their revenge clause when an unknown assailant slaughters every living thing at a remote logging site. The forest around here is an extremely dangerous place to be, but so too is NJ McCall. Some battles, though, can’t be won by GX-Cannon and railguns alone…

Short Revenge Squad novel Hurt U Back was a Legionary exclusive for nine months, and will be unleashed on an unsuspecting wider world on Friday. It was originally labeled as Book2, but I’m making it book1. If you read and enjoyed the Legionary edition of Hurt U Back, then I’d appreciate it if you could leave a review on the Amazon edition. It would be very helpful, and NJ needs all the help he can get to keep telling his story because the first book sold poorly.

After War is being relaunched as a slightly altered edition. This was originally book1, but is now being relabeled as a prequel.

The reason for the relabeling is that the first book doesn’t fit neatly enough with the others. By the time of Second Strike, the main character, NJ McCall, is happily running amok through the streets of Port Zahir, blowing things up, and trying to bring the real bad guys down. That’s where the series belongs. But with the first book, After War, he starts off broken and bitter before he goes through a transformation to become the person he is in Hurt U Back. I think it’s a great book, but it has a different vibe to the other Revenge Squad stories, so I’ve separated it out.

More details as they come in…

Hope to see you Friday.

Oh, yes, one more thing. I’m going to be at Fantasycon, Peterborough on Saturday, September 30th. If anyone’s going, let me know 🙂