Hello!

Right off the bat, if you didn’t know there’s a sequel to When Among Crows coming out on September 16th, I have great news for you: there’s a sequel to When Among Crows coming out on September 16th. It’s called TO CLUTCH A RAZOR, and the cover looks like this:

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I have been obsessed with it since it first landed in my inbox months ago. The art is by Eleonor Piteira, who also did the art for When Among Crows, and the cover design is by Katie Klimowicz and Shreya Gupta.

If you’re wondering “hey, why are there two Dymitrs on that cover?”, trust me, you will understand once you read it.

The title comes from the Polish expression, tonący brzytwy się chwyta, which roughly translates to “a drowning man will clutch at a razor”—basically, a drowning man is so desperate that he will grab anything to save himself. It’s often translated in English as “a drowning man clutches at straws,” which I feel loses the entire element of desperation that the original expression communicates. You have to be pretty damn desperate to grab a razor blade to save yourself from drowning. Straws, not so much.

It’s the perfect expression for this story, and here’s the synopsis:

A funeral. A heist. A mission born of desperation.

When someone in Dymitr’s family dies, he’s called back home for the Empty Night, a funeral rite intended to keep evil at bay.

The secret Dymitr is keeping from them makes returning home downright dangerous, but if he wants to get his hands on a book of curses that might appease Baba Jaga’s blood lust, he has no choice. And when that same funeral brings ferocious creature-of-legend Niko to town for his own bloody purposes, Dymitr’s charade becomes impossible to maintain.

Family gatherings can be brutal. Dymitr’s might just be fatal.

If you remember what happens to Dymitr at the end of When Among Crows, you’ll know that returning home to his family is…definitely the choice of a desperate man. What if they find out what he’s really like? And how will they seem to him, now that he’s made such an important decision about himself?

Writing this was so much fun. And the great thing about a sequel is that I could work on deepening and complicating the character relationships now that they’ve already “met” and chosen each other. Plus: new creatures you may not have heard of (and some you likely have!).

Preorder it here or at your favorite retailer.

<3,

V

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