Steve Vincent is a thriller writer whose work I dig, so I was pleased to see him giving it away. (In return for the usual consideration of an email address and a tiny little piece of your soul. Seriously, a very small piece. You won't even notice the sting).

Steve's got a copy of Fireplay for you, right here.

And I have the prologue below:

PROLOGUE
A flash of lightning illuminated the cell with pale light for only a split second, long enough for Hewad Ghilzai to see his friend on the floor. Positioned unnaturally, he hadn’t moved since the American soldiers had left several hours ago. Hewad hadn’t moved either. He was too scared. He’d been hurt too many times.
Hewad held his knees to his chest and kept his back against the wall. His mind was empty and his tear ducts were dry. Only his grief and the smell of human feces kept his attention in this world at all. He awaited the next. He’d taken the fight to the infidel and ended up in a place worse than hell.
He’d done everything right. Had Allah abandoned him? On most nights the stars provided enough light to see the outline of his bed, the latrine pail and the grilled steel that penned him in, but tonight he couldn’t see an inch in front of his hand. The world was as dark as the heart of his captors, except when lightning lashed at the mountains.
Footsteps approached and a feint light lit the corridor outside his cell. He instinctively hugged his knees tighter and his eyes shot towards the door. As he waited the footsteps grew louder and the light brighter. He whimpered as the heavy door unlocked with a clunk and opened with a squeal.
“Evening haji.” The soldier’s drawl was unmistakable, even as the cell door slammed shut. “I thought you could use some company, what with the storm and all.”
Hewad said nothing. He hadn’t always been so passive and afraid. The blows from combat boots and rifle butts had started a conversion that mutilations and degradation had completed. He was a broken man, a spent soul trapped in a body that had nearly expired.
“Nothing to say?” The soldier sighed as he held the flashlight up to Hewad’s face. “You had some spunk, haji, but now you’re as lively as your friend over there.”
Hewad lifted his hands to shield his eyes as the soldier laughed at his own joke. The light felt like another assault after so much darkness, though it was nothing compared to whatever struck him across the side of the head. It staggered him. He fell onto his side, curled into a ball and tried to protect himself as best he could.
Blows rained on him and he felt himself starting to black out when he heard an earsplitting boom and felt an enormous shockwave. He rolled onto his back and opened his eyes, confused. The flashlight was on the ground, illuminating the chaos. The soldier lay still and half of the wall was missing.
Hewad blinked several times and his senses slowly returned. His pain was intense but in the depths of his mind excitement sparked. He looked at the soldier for several minutes, waiting for him to move. Finally he inched closer, paused and then scurried over and felt for a pulse. None. Allah had delivered him.
He shoved the man. When the body didn’t move Hewad’s eyes widened and he clawed for the man’s canteen, unscrewed the lid and drank deeply. Some of the water spilled to the sand as he sucked at it, gulping and coughing as he fought to overcome the most incredible thirst.
When the water ran out he glanced at the soldier’s sidearm. To take it would be to re-enter the fight, to forget the next life for the moment and take up arms again in this world. He stared at the pistol for several long moments and then looked at the hole that had been blown in the wall. He knew the will of Allah.
Hewad took the soldier’s pistol and boots and then staggered to his feet. He walked towards the hole in the wall, where the lightning had struck the steel window grill and fractured much of the poor quality wall. He hesitated briefly. To step through would mean death if he was captured, but to stay would be to spit in the face of Allah’s mercy. He spat on the soldier instead.
Hewad stepped outside.

Cairo broke into the top 1000 of Amazon's global sales rank this morning. So thanks, again, to everyone who helped out, which is pretty much all of you.

Now, I just need to get rid of Stephen King and Philip K Dick.

They're always standing in my way, those bastards.

I'll be heading off to the airport in a couple of hours to take flight for Sydney. Hoping to get the final files for the Hooper ebooks before I go. It'd be nice to give them a push at the festival.

It's not officially released for a couple of weeks yet, but you just can't contain this beast. It has escaped. You'll find copies in random bookstores, mostly indies, I'd guess. But for anyone looking to grab one online I've reordered the shelves at my private bookstore. For now the links go to preorders. Best way to get one immediately is the old fashioned way.

I'm in Sydney for the Festival from Thursday arvo, but they've got me running around a lot while I'm there, and doing gigs both nights. I'm more likely to be free for a catch up when I return in Jul/Aug.

In related news, Cairo is doing very well. It's hovering around the top five in the categories I chose for it (alternate history and time travel) with my path to the top blocked by Stephen King and Philip K Dick.

I can live with that.

I had an email from Jason Lambright, a reader (and now a writer), who had some kind words about Weapons of Choice, which helped get him through his time in some of the dustier parts of the world.

He writes, "I always carried my Sony Ereader in my assault pack along with grenades, flares, extra ammo, etc. It was always with me until it got fragged in the Andarab Valley (adjacent to the Panshir) in Afghanistan. Here is a photo I took in a village by the Konduz river, you can't see it but my assault pack (and my trusty ereader with your books on it) was in the turret with me."

Jason came home (Huzzah!) and set to writing some sci fi (Huzzah x2!)

The novel is called In the Valley and you can hit up the text link or the ad below to grab it. It's old fashioned military sci fi. The Dirty Dozen on the final frontier. I'm going through it now, making some notes to send him. You can just buy it, read it and enjoy it. Then go give him some reviews.

Go on. It's the least you can do.

Just a quick note to say thanks to everyone who left a review on Cairo. It pushed the book up the popularity ranks, which gave it enough visibility to get into the Hot New Release listing. I'm pondering how to reward y'all.

One of the things about going back into the Axis of Time series is the frustrating delight of contemplating all the technologies I missed. We didn't get fusion stacks. Instead of Posh we got Siri and Alexa. We did get flexipads, but we got them in the form of mobile phones.
Still, I don't see any point in slavishly adhering to the canon. So in Cairo we read a lot of detail about the mil-grade cell phones being used by Harry, Julia and Viv. I'm not sure flexipads are mentioned, and I'm certain that data slates are not. Nobody has complained yet.

So one of the things I'm enjoying as I return to the series is finding stuff that I can sneak in under the retcon radar. This bio-gel refrigerator concept for Electrolux, by Russian designer Yuriy Dmitriev is a great example.

Bio gel technology gets a few mentions throughout the original novels, enough to let me get away with putting something like this in the later books. Of course you can't build something like this with 1950s augmented technology – or at least I don't I think you can – but the nice thing about well-made refrigerators is that they run for years. And this bad boy doesn't even have any moving parts to break down. I can totally see Vice President Kohlhammer having a big green beer fridge just like this in his office. He couldn't keep his Heinekens in there, though. You'd never be able to find them.