The sixth Alex Verus novel, Veiled, is available in the US and Canada as of today!
If you want to buy a copy, you can get it in paper or electronic format.
If you’d like to read the review in Publisher’s Weekly, click here.
And you can read the first chapter online for free right here.
I’m glad. I’ve been waiting along time Benedict… 🙂
Arrived in my kindle this AM!
Audio as well!
Fantastic! I got started around 2:30am this morning (yay for noc shifts! ;D) and just finished. I’m DYING for the next book already.
Was the final scene inspired by the Amerlyn raising ceremony from the Wheel of Time series? I was a little tickled by the resemblance.
Marvelous job, Mr. Jacka!
Finally! Uh, any idea when it’d be available in Singapore?
Finished the novel today, a very good read! Loved the political intrigue and the fact that Alex is the inadvertent catalyst for the outcome of the story. Time to post my review to Amazon.
Kat: Good eye. 🙂
Locnil: Should be available now – world rights go with the UK rights.
I love this series, for several reasons, and Veiled was great. But I’m a bit unhappy with Alex Verus right now, and I’m wondering if that was your intention.
* Mild Spoiler below, for those who haven’t finished the book *
When Verus is attacked and wounded by that air mage, a woman – a muggle 🙂 – bravely stands up to confront the attacker, armed with nothing but her cell phone. The mage smashes her to the ground and leaves her unconscious and badly injured.
Verus walks away.
Now, that’s not my problem, not really. He’s badly injured himself, and he can hear the sirens. Help is apparently on the way. He doesn’t even walk over to check on the woman, but then, what’s he going to do?
However, after that, he never even thinks about her again. Verus himself is magically healed by a life mage, but what about this woman who risked her own life to save his? He doesn’t even wonder how badly she was hurt. He doesn’t check on her recovery. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t think about her at all.
Verus disappointed me there. At the very least, he could have checked the hospital. At most,… well, Anne is a life mage who could probably help the woman a great deal even while keeping the woman completely unaware of it. But Verus just walks away and that’s that.
I’m wondering if that was deliberate. Am I suppose to recognize that Alex Verus, as decent as he is, still has some of the same condescension as other mages when it comes to ordinary people? He’s a good guy, but ordinary, non-magical people are beneath the notice of most mages. Does Verus unconsciously have that same attitude, himself?
Was that your intention? I’m just curious. A friend, who has very similar tastes in fiction to my own, had no problem with this. Indeed, she didn’t even notice. And she points out that Verus had plenty on his plate already, so I should give him a pass on this.
But it bugged me. It certainly didn’t affect my enjoyment of the book, but it might make me like Alex Verus a little less. 🙂
Was this deliberate? (As I say, I love the series. Great job!)
Bill: One of the things I try to get across with the way I present the books is that the world Alex lives in is very different than is the norm for Western society. For most people living in the US or the UK, doing something stupid means that you get embarrassed or inconvenienced in some way. For someone in Alex’s world, doing something stupid can get you killed. And not killed as in ‘some time in the future’, but killed as in right this second, do not pass Go, go directly to dead.
One of the effects of this is that Alex has a fairly unforgiving attitude towards questions of personal responsibility. If you do something stupid (and objectively speaking, what that woman did was very stupid), then Alex isn’t going to lose much sleep worrying about you. In this case he gave her one warning; when she didn’t listen, Alex mentally washed his hands of her and went back to trying to stay alive himself.
So does that make Alex condescending, or callous? That’s for you to judge.
“So does that make Alex condescending, or callous?”
Callous. But understandably so. And condescending, too. 🙂
I do disagree that that the woman was “very stupid.” And I disagree that Alex Verus warned her. After all, she had no idea of magic. Even if he’d warned her about magic – which he didn’t – she wouldn’t have believed him. Does that make her stupid?
Maybe it would be stupid to do that when someone had a knife, but I don’t think so. And that’s what she had good reason to think.
Furthermore, how is this any different from our world (at least, here in America)? If the attacker had a gun, rather than magic, what difference would that have made? No difference at all, as far as I can see.
In both worlds, you could end up dead in a situation like this. In both worlds – from her point of view – that was the right thing to do. It wasn’t stupid at all, but brave.
You’re right that Alex’s world is different, but it’s not different for that woman. It’s his magical world that’s different – both callous and condescending, but mostly extremely violent – but she’s not a part of that world, so she doesn’t recognize her danger. Nor should she be expected to.
Thanks for the reply. I still don’t like Alex Verus as much as I used to. 🙂 But I like your books very much.