A paladin, an assassin, a forger, and a scholar ride out of town. It’s not the start of a joke, but rather an espionage mission with deadly serious stakes. T. Kingfisher’s new novel begins the tale of a murderous band of criminals (and a scholar), thrown together in an attempt to unravel the secret of the Clockwork Boys, mechanical soldiers from a neighboring kingdom that promise ruin to the Dowager’s city. If they succeed, rewards and pardons await, but that requires a long journey through enemy territory, directly into the capital. It also requires them to refrain from killing each other along the way! At turns darkly comic and touching, Clockwork Boys puts together a broken group of people trying to make the most of the rest of their lives as they drive forward on their suicide mission.

Shannon Chakraborty, the bestselling author of The City of Brass, spins a new trilogy of magic and mayhem on the high seas in this tale of pirates and sorcerers, forbidden artifacts and ancient mysteries, in one woman’s determined quest to seize a final chance at glory—and write her own legend. Amina al-Sirafi should be content. After a storied and scandalous career as one of the Indian Ocean’s most notorious pirates, she’s survived backstabbing rogues, vengeful merchant princes, several husbands, and one actual demon to retire peacefully with her family to a life of piety, motherhood, and absolutely nothing that hints of the supernatural. But when she’s tracked down by the obscenely wealthy mother of a former crewman, she’s offered a job no bandit could refuse: retrieve her comrade’s kidnapped daughter for a kingly sum. The chance to have one last adventure with her crew, do right by an old friend, and win a fortune that will secure her family’s future forever? It seems like such an obvious choice that it must be God’s will. Yet the deeper Amina dives, the more it becomes alarmingly clear there’s more to this job, and the girl’s disappearance, than she was led to believe. For there’s always risk in wanting to become a legend, to seize one last chance at glory, to savor just a bit more power…and the price might be your very soul.

Tryss just wants to get home to say goodbye to her dad before he passes away, but when she pulls off the freeway to find a gas station, she ends up stuck in Bethesda, a backwoods town with no cell service and a car that won’t start. Worse still, the town’s citizens aren’t exactly…alive. Unless you count the Barbs. They’re Bethesda’s sisterhood of cloned caretakers, and they may look friendly, but like the town, surface impressions can be deceiving. In her attempt to leave, Tryss meets Aiden, who’s been stuck in Bethesda for six months and has all but given up hope of escaping. They team up to figure out the town’s deadly—and just plain weird—secrets, but will the town actually let them leave?

Tryss just wants to get home to say goodbye to her dad before he passes away, but when she pulls off the freeway to find a gas station, she ends up stuck in Bethesda, a backwoods town with no cell service and a car that won’t start. Worse still, the town’s citizens aren’t exactly…alive. Unless you count the Barbs. They’re Bethesda’s sisterhood of cloned caretakers, and they may look friendly, but like the town, surface impressions can be deceiving. In her attempt to leave, Tryss meets Aiden, who’s been stuck in Bethesda for six months and has all but given up hope of escaping. They team up to figure out the town’s deadly—and just plain weird—secrets, but will the town actually let them leave?

For fans of Legends & Lattes and Dungeons & Dragons comes an unconventional hero’s journey told through the perspective of a non-player character in a fantasy role-playing game. Anya Dazel is a burnt-out barkeep in The Endless Realm, the world’s premier online role-playing game. As a non-player character, her life is stuck in a programmed loop—forever serving the same drinks to the same patrons and helping players with an automatic quest event that unfolds when they enter her pub. She longs for any disruption to this monotonous existence, even if that feels like an impossible dream. But when Eternity receives an update, and Cyrus Blackwood is added to Anya’s pub, her dream unfurls as a nightmare. Cyrus is everything that Anya is not—a mysterious, brooding warrior with a gigantic sword and a tortured past. Everyone in the tavern is fascinated by him, and even worse, when the next player arrives, it’s Cyrus who helps them with their quest, not Anya. Realizing that she’s being replaced, Anya lashes out at Cyrus, inadvertently knocking them both out of her tavern and into the wider realm of Eternity. Free from their encoded home, Anya and Cyrus must work together to navigate a dangerous open world, overcoming hordes of monsters, devious puzzles, and maybe even an existential crisis or two. But as they struggle to overcome their distaste for each other and stay alive, they discover that their roles within Eternity might not be as programmed as they thought, and Anya will need to prove that even barkeeps can be heroes.