It’s been six years since Zaya Shearwater lost her wife and her dragon in the most dangerous race in Yemareir. She’s retired from the dragon-racing circuit, supporting her family as a security guard on long-haul trade expeditions… until she comes back one night to discover that her newly adopted daughter, Vanako, has been dealing for a mob boss. Worse, she owes him a sky-high sum of money for lost product. And there’s not much he wouldn’t do – to Vanako, to Zaya, or to anyone in their family – to get it back.
Zaya doesn’t want to go back to the racing circuit. She doesn’t have a trained dragon, she doesn’t have anyone to ride with, and she thought she’d put those memories of pain and loss away. But even if she does ride again… after six years away from the scene, can she win what she needs in time to pay what she owes?
Windburn Whiplash is the first full-length novel in the Streets of Flame Quartet. Start with Brimstone Slipstream, the novella that opens the series, and keep an eye out for Heatstroke Heartbeat and Wildfire Riptide, forthcoming!
This is the book I’ve spent the last several years working on. It’s got bright-feathered dragons racing through the streets of a magic-warped city; it’s got a queer found family; it’s got fantasy drugs, it’s got implacable transdimensional predators disguised as animals, it’s got walrus-bats and wagonloads of durian and a graveyard that makes you hallucinate the dead; it’s got love and grief and friendship and death.
It goes live on February 14, but you can put in a pre-order now!
And thanks so much if you do. I hope you like it.