WHEN FALCONS FALL Cover Reveal!

Yes, I'm home from London, jetlagged, footsore, and worried by some serious reorganization going on over at Penguins Random House. BUT..... Here's the cover for the new book! Coming March 2016:

So what do you think?

Here's the cover copy (which I may have posted before, but I'm too jetlagged to remember):

The tragic death of an enigmatic young stranger draws Sebastian St. Cyr and his wife, Hero, into a perilous tangle of passion and intrigue in this breath-taking new mystery from the “best historical thriller writer in the business.” [Lisa Gardner]

Ayleswick-on-Teme, 1813. Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, has come to this seemingly peaceful Shropshire village to honor a slain friend and on a quest to learn more about his own ancestry. But when the body of a lovely widow is found on the banks of the River Teme, a bottle of laudanum at her side, the village’s inexperienced new magistrate turns to St. Cyr for help.

Almost immediately, Sebastian realizes that Emma Chance did not, in truth, take her own life. Less easy to discern is exactly how she died, and why. For as Sebastian and Hero soon discover, Emma  was hiding both her true identity and her real reasons for traveling to Ayleswick. Also troubling are the machinations of Lucien Bonaparte, the estranged brother of the megalomaniac French Emperor Napoleon. Held captive under the British government’s watchful eye, the younger Bonaparte is restless, ambitious, and treacherous.

Sebastian’s investigation takes on new urgency when he discovers that Emma was not the first, or even the second, beautiful young woman in the village to die under suspicious circumstances. Home to a haunting, ruined monastery, Ayleswick reveals itself to be a dark and dangerous place of secrets that have festered among the villagers for decades—and a violent past that may be connected to Sebastian’s own unsettling origins.  And as he faces his most diabolical opponent ever, he is forced to consider what malevolence he’s willing to embrace in order to destroy a killer.

Wondering What the Next Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery Is About?

My editor and I have spent the better part of the last two days tweaking the cover copy for WHEN FALCONS FALL, sending versions back and forth, agonizing over every little word. For those not familiar with the term, the "cover copy" is the blurb on the cover that tells readers what a book is about. So without further ado, here is the copy for WHEN FALCONS FALL (in stores March 2016).

The tragic death of an enigmatic young stranger draws Sebastian St. Cyr and his wife, Hero, into a perilous tangle of passion and intrigue in this breathtaking new mystery from the “best historical thriller writer in the business.” 

Ayleswick-on-Teme, 1813. Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, has come to this seemingly peaceful Shropshire village on the Welsh borderlands to honor a slain friend and on a quest to learn more about his own unknown ancestry. But when the body of a lovely young widow is found on the banks of the River Teme, a bottle of laudanum at her side, the village’s inexperienced new magistrate turns to St. Cyr for help.

Almost immediately, Sebastian realizes that Emma Chance did not, in truth, take her own life. Less easy to discern is exactly how she died, and why. For as Sebastian and Hero soon discover, Emma was hiding much about her real identity, and her purported sketching excursion to Ayleswick concealed a far more grave intention. Also troubling are the machinations of Lucien Bonaparte, the handsome, estranged brother of the megalomaniac French Emperor Napoleon. Held captive in the neighborhood under the British government’s watchful eye, the younger Bonaparte is restless, ambitious, and possibly involved in sinister intrigues.

Sebastian’s investigation takes on new urgency when he discovers that Emma Chance was not the first, or even the second, beautiful young woman in the village to die under suspicious circumstances. Home to an ancient, hauntingly ruined monastery, Ayleswick reveals itself to be a dark and dangerous place of deadly secrets that have festered among the villagers for decades—and a violent past that may tell Sebastian more than he wants to know about his own unsettling origins.  And as he faces his most diabolical opponent ever, he is forced to consider what malevolence he’s willing to embrace in order to destroy a killer.

WHO BURIES THE DEAD Cover Copy

Been wondering what the next book is about? Here's the cover flap copy:

The grisly murder of a West Indies slave owner and the reappearance of a dangerous enemy from Sebastian St. Cyr’s past combine to put C. S. Harris’s "troubled but compelling antihero" to the ultimate test in this taut, thrilling new mystery.

London, 1813. The vicious decapitation of Stanley Preston, a wealthy, socially ambitious plantation owner, at Bloody Bridge draws Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, into a macabre and increasingly perilous investigation. The discovery near the body of an aged lead coffin strap bearing the inscription king charles, 1648 suggests a link between this killing and the beheading of the deposed seventeenth-century Stuart monarch. Equally troubling, the victim’s kinship to the current Home Secretary draws the notice of Sebastian’s powerful father-in-law, Lord Jarvis, who will exploit any means to pursue his own clandestine ends.

Working in concert with his fiercely independent wife, Hero, Sebastian finds his inquiries taking him from the wretched back alleys of Fish Street Hill to the royal castle of Windsor as he amasses a list of suspects who range from an eccentric Chelsea curiosity collector to the brother of an unassuming but brilliantly observant spinster named Jane Austen.

But as one brutal murder follows another, it is the connection between the victims and ruthless former army officer Sinclair, Lord Oliphant, that dramatically raises the stakes. Once, Oliphant nearly destroyed Sebastian in a horrific wartime act of carnage and betrayal. Now the vindictive former colonel might well pose a threat not only to Sebastian but to everything—and everyone—Sebastian holds most dear.

What Darkness Brings

I don't think I posted this before. At any rate, here is the cover copy for What Darkness Brings, book number eight in the Sebastian St. Cyr series.



The death of a notorious London diamond merchant draws aristocratic investigator Sebastian St. Cyr and his new wife Hero into a sordid world of greed, desperation, and the occult, when the husband of Sebastian’s former lover Kat Boleyn is accused of the murder.

Regency England, September 1812: After a long night spent dealing with the tragic death of a former military comrade, a heart-sick Sebastian learns of a new calamity: Russell Yates, the dashing, one-time privateer who married Kat a year ago, has been found standing over the corpse of Benjamin Eisler, a powerful gem dealer. Yates insists he is innocent, but he will surely hang unless Sebastian can unmask the real killer.

For the sake of Kat, the woman he once loved and lost, Sebastian plunges into a treacherous circle of intrigue. Although Eisler’s clients included the Prince Regent and the Emperor Napoleon, he was a despicable man with many enemies and a number of dangerous, well-kept secrets—including a passion for arcane texts and black magic. Central to the case is a magnificent blue diamond, believed to have once formed part of the French crown jewels, which disappeared on the night of Eisler’s death. As Sebastian traces the diamond’s ownership, he uncovers links that implicate an eccentric, powerful financier named Hope and stretch back into the darkest days of the French Revolution.

As the killer grows ever more desperate and vicious, Sebastian finds his still-new marriage to Hero tested by his loyalty to his first love, especially when Sebastian begins to suspect that Kat is keeping secrets of her own. And when matters reach a crisis, Sebastian must face a bitter truth—that he has been less than honest with the calm, fearless woman who is now his wife.

Book Trailer for When Maidens Mourn

I'm not convinced these things do any good sales-wise, but they're fun to make and they seem to cheer my publisher, so here's the new book video for When Maidens Mourn:



And here's the cover copy:

Tales of King Arthur and the Lady of Shalott provide inspiration for this latest gripping installment in the Sebastian St. Cyr mystery series when, just four days wed, the aristocratic investigator and his fiercely independent bride, Hero Jarvis, find themselves caught up in a twisted intrigue of ancient legends and a deadly family curse.

Regency England, August 1812: Sebastian’s plans to escape the heat of London for a honeymoon are shattered when the murdered body of Hero’s good friend, Gabrielle Tennyson, is discovered drifting in a battered boat at the site of a long-vanished castle known as Camlet Moat. A beautiful young antiquarian, Miss Tennyson had recently provoked an uproar with her controversial identification of the island as the location of Camelot. Missing and presumed also dead are Gabrielle’s two young cousins, nine-year-old George and three-year-old Alfred.

Still struggling to define the nature of their new marriage, Sebastian and Hero find themselves occasionally working at cross-purposes as their investigation leads from London’s medieval Inns of Court to its seedy back alleys, and from grand country homes to rural enclaves where ancient Celtic beliefs still hold sway. As he probes deeper, Sebastian also discovers dark secrets at the heart of the Tennyson family, and an enigmatic young French lieutenant with a dangerous, mysterious secret of his own.

Racing to unmask a ruthless killer and unravel the puzzle of the missing children, Sebastian and Hero soon find both their lives and their growing love for each other at risk as their investigation leads to Hero’s father, who is also Sebastian’s long-time nemesis… and to a tall, dark stranger who may hold the key to Sebastian’s own parentage.

More Cover Copy

**

Here's the cover copy for The Babylonian Codex, the next C.S. Graham thriller due out this December. They let me do some tweaking, but this is it.

An ancient Biblical prophesy...
The convening of the richest and most powerful men on earth...
The sudden, mysterious death of the vice president.

When Iraq War vet October “Tobie” Guinness volunteers to remote view a priceless artifact looted from war-ravaged Baghdad, she unwittingly becomes the main target in the midst of a horrific bloodbath. Now a fugitive accused of murder, Tobie turns for help from her sometime partner, rogue CIA agent Jax Alexander. Ranging from a high mountain Moroccan kasbah and a medieval English church to a frozen Idaho lake, the two must race to unravel the secrets that link a long lost mosaic to a mysterious Biblical codex in time to stop a deadly cabal of wealthy, powerful zealots with a chilling plot to remake the world and bring on the Second Coming.

Incidentally, I almost lost my title at the last minute. Sales suddenly found both "Babylon" and "Codex" too scary. I mean, who ever heard of Babylon? And what IS a codex, anyway? But they finally calmed down and let me keep it. Which is a relief, since the entire book revolves around a McGuffin called the Babylonian Codex. To call it anything else would have been weird.

And if you're wondering about the significance of the photo of the Ravenna mosaic above, they used it on the cover. I received the first JPGs today, but I had some suggestions for changes, so you can't see it yet.

The Copy

Well, here's what we have so far. It still needs some tweaking (that first sentence just isn't right), but it's a huge improvement on what was there before. Did I mention these things are always done on a rush, with a deadline of anywhere from one to twelve hours?

**

That’s the challenge confronting C.S. Harris’s aristocratic soldier-turned-sleuth Sebastian St. Cyr when his friend, surgeon and “anatomist” Paul Gibson, buys the cadaver of a young man from London’s infamous body snatchers. A rising star at the Foreign Office, Mr. Alexander Ross was reported to have died of a weak heart. But when Gibson discovers a stiletto wound at the base of Ross’s skull, he can only turn to Sebastian for help in catching the killer.

Described by all who knew him as an amiable young man, Ross at first seems an unlikely candidate for murder. But as Sebastian’s search for the killer takes him from the Queen’s drawing rooms in St. James’s Palace to the embassies of Russia, the fledgling United States, and the Turkish Empire, he plunges into a dangerous shadow land of diplomatic maneuvering and international intrigue, where truth is an elusive commodity and nothing is as it seems.

At the same time, Sebastian must confront the turmoil of his personal life. Hero Jarvis, daughter of Sebastian’s powerful nemesis Lord Jarvis, finally agrees to become his wife. But as their wedding approaches, Sebastian can’t escape the growing realization that both Jarvis and Hero know far more about the events surrounding Ross’s death than they would have him believe.

Then a second body is found, badly decomposed but bearing the same fatal stiletto wound. And Sebastian must race to unmask a ruthless killer who has now become a threat to the life of his reluctant bride and their still unborn child.

Cover Copy Time

You know what cover copy is, right? It’s that little blurb on the back of a paperback or on the inside flap of a hardcover dust jacket that tells you what the book is about. A great cover might lure readers to pick up a book in the store, but it’s the cover copy that usually seals their impulse to buy. Some people are amazingly adept at reaching into the heart of a story and distilling its essence in a way that is both intriguing and profound; most people, quite frankly, suck at it.

I suck at it.

Writing cover copy and writing books are two very different arts. Good cover copy is more like song writing or poetry; it's a skillful seduction that uses key words and the emotions they evoke to tempt and woo the reader. To quote one Internet guru, “The words you place on the back cover of your book are the words that will either walk your book right up to the cash register or march it back to the shelves. Your back cover is the final billboard, a point-of-sale advertisement, and the last piece of promotional material that hits potential purchasers on their way to pay. It can either lure readers inside your pages with well-chosen words or knock the wind out of your sales with faint and feebly-phrased copy.”

In other words, cover copy is scarily important. Did I mention the fact that most people suck at it? Unfortunately, a lot of those people are employed by publishing houses in what they call the “copy department.”

In the last week, I’ve had cover copy for both Where Shadows Dance and The Babylonian Codex land in my email box with notes from my books’ respective editors that said something like, “This just in from the copy department. It’s awful! Can you fix it?” The problem is, an author is usually not the best person to have writing cover copy. I mean, I just spent 100,000 words telling this story and now you want me to reduce it down to 250 words or less, in a way that will seduce readers into buying it? Seriously?

In the end, the final product is usually a mishmash of what the copy department wrote and what I wrote, with some tweaking by the editor. In other words, copy by committee. And you know how well that usually works out.