Orbit Books has announced that it has acquired a new trilogy from M.A. Carrick, the nom de plume for the writing duo of “Memoirs of Lady Trent” series author Marie Brennan and “Missy Masters” series author Alyc Helms.
Carrick explains The Rook and Rose trilogy:
What is it? Epic fantasy. But that sells it short. It has fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, and miracles, and we’re only sorry we didn’t manage to get a giant in there; maybe we can make somebody really tall during editorial revisions? Also the kind of worldbuilding that happens when you let two anthropologists off their leashes. It has a con artist, a vigilante, and capers as flirtation. It has normalized queerness and weird dream shit because we love that stuff, yo. It has noble politics and street gangs and deception layered so deep that Marie literally made a color-coded chart at one point about who knew what, which persona of theirs knew it, and whether other people knew they knew it.
Orbit describes the trilogy as “a grand, richly textured, politically-charged story, which takes readers to magical Nadežra, whimsically known as the City of Dreams.”
Ren is a con artist seeking to pull off the ultimate scheme: tricking her way into one Nadežra’s noble houses to secure her fortune and her sister’s future. But as she’s drawn into the upper crust world of House Traementis, she realizes her masquerade is just one of many surrounding her, whether it’s the real identity of the legendary vigilante known as the Rook or the true motivations of a charming, enigmatic crime lord–and that the dark feuds of the nobility and the shadowed dangers of the city’s impoverished underbelly are far more tangled than she could ever have imagined.
“In the meantime,” says Carrick, “we’ll leave you with what has become our unofficial theme song”: