Cover Art! 'The Black Mausoleum' (Stephen Deas)

For a whole number of reasons, that were nothing to do with the books themselves, I never got into Stephen Deas' 'A Memory of Flames' books but the blurb for 'The Black Mausoleum' makes it look like a very good place to jump on board. Not only that but the cover art quite literally grabbed me by the eyeballs and demanded that I read a bit more. Check it out and you'll see why,

The resolution isn't brilliant, sorry about that, but I think you can see where I'm coming from here :o) It's not clear who came up with the cover art, not from the book anyway, but it's clear that they are the person to go to if you're after a dragon drawn in all its 'I'm going to eat you puny man-thing' glory. Great stuff.

Here's the blurb for those who are interested. Beware spoilers if you haven't read the first three books either...

Two years have passed since the events of the Order of the Scales. Across the realms, dragons are still hatching. Hatching, and hatching free.

Skorl is an Ember, a soldier trained from birth to fight dragons. He is a living weapon, one-shot only, saturated with enough dragon-poison to bring down a monster all on his own. Misanthrope, violent and a drunk, to fulfil his purpose and slay a dragon, means to be eaten. Now Skorl has a choice: he can hang for his crimes, or he can go with the last of the Adamantine Men, fighting against an enemy he was born to face. Rat is an Outsider. He's on the run and he's stumbled onto something that's going to make him rich beyond all his dreams. It's just a shame that the end of the world has started without him. Kataros is an alchemist, one of the order responsible for keeping the dragons in check. One of the order that has just failed, and disastrously so. 

Two men, one woman. One chance to save the world from a storm of dragons ...

'The Black Mausoleum' is on the 'I'll definitely read this one' pile but, unfortunately, so are around a hundred other books. I'll get to it at some point :o)