The Sword-Edged Blonde

It should have been a case like any other: a missing princess, a king willing to pay in gold for her return. But before he realizes it, private investigator Eddie LaCrosse, a slightly shopworn sword jockey with a talent for discretion and detection, is swept up in a web of mystery and deceit involving a brutally murdered royal heir, a queen accused of an unspeakable crime and the tragic past he thought he'd left behind.Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Equal parts sword-and-sorcery action/adventure and noir whodunit, Bledsoe's finely polished debut is evocative of fantasy legend Fritz Leiber's classic tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Bledsoe's narrative, while set in a comparable world, features only one protagonist: sword jockey Eddie LaCrosse, a private investigator who has spent most of his life trying to distance himself from a shadowy and tragic past. When his old childhood friend, King Philip of Arentia, enlists his help to unravel a scandalous mystery surrounding the brutal death of the young royal heir—a murder in which the king's beautiful wife, Rhiannon, is the prime suspect—LaCrosse accepts only to encounter a deity who forces him to come to grips with the horrific events of his youth. Incorporating elements from both hard-boiled mystery and heroic fantasy, Bledsoe's genre-blending first novel is both stylish and self-assured: Raymond Chandler meets Raymond E. Feist. (Nov.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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