Are You Hooked? Adult Genre Fiction #4

TITLE: THE ELEGANCE OF TYRANNY
GENRE: Adult - Crossover Fantasy

A nineteen-year-old bootlegger must work alongside a crew of outlaws and a young man she hates to break the curse holding hostage their city of monsters and dark magic.

The reason Tristas preferred the Hinterlands, the barren northern tundra with snow as deep as his shoulders and trees white as the eyes of a startled victim, over the cities and towns to the south could be summed up in a single word: people.

It was why he avoided parties when he had to travel, why he stayed far from parades and dinners and small talk.

And yet, here he was. Standing on a fire-lit street corner, the flames crackling behind the beveled glass of the lantern overhead, the black iron post cool against his shoulder. It seemed a smokeboy had forgotten about this lamp on his morning round.

It had been a long time since Tristas had seen people. Ordinary people, that was, the kind who strolled along with walking canes and parasols, parcels wrapped in brown paper tucked under their arms, with voices and laughter filling the streets. Laughter was a strange sound. In the whole of Tristas’s twenty-one years of life, he’d known only three people whose laughter he could stomach: his mother, his best friend, and the girl whose name he had vowed to never even think again.
He certainly fit in with everyone walking past, what with his black waistcoat buttoned up beneath his overcoat, and trousers over his boots, which gleamed despite their scuffs. His upbringing was ingrained so deeply into him he didn’t know of any other way to dress. Even when doing his job as a Northern Warden, though more often than not he chose to wear a hooded cloak as his alias Gavan Baines.