For five days, the biggest book I've ever written costs nothing.
From June 30 through July 4, Graveyard of Empires — Book One of the saga that shares its name — is free on Kindle. Not a sample. Not a first-chapter tease that drops you at a paywall. The whole novel, all hundred-and-forty-thousand words of it, yours to keep.
Most of what people know me for is horror. This is the other side of my shelf — a big, multi-thread military science fiction story about a galaxy coming apart at the seams. So here's what it actually is, and who it's for, before you spend an evening with it.
What the book is about
Let me give you the hook the way I'd give it to a friend.
In this galaxy, everything that matters runs on neural hardware. Implants. Augmentation. Every edge a person has is bought and engineered into the skull. Then a Ministry official named Argus Wade finds a boy who can move objects with his mind — and there's nothing in the kid's head. No implant. No hardware. Just bone.
His name is Traq Lane, and he's the kind of miracle people will burn a star system to own.
That's one thread. There are several, and they're all walking toward the same place without knowing it.
Light-years from Traq, a man named Darius Gray declares independence from the Republic and sets an entire sector on fire. A frightened bodyguard goes on the run with the boy across worlds that all want him dead or owned. A starship captain hands down death sentences through a six-year-old envoy, because that's just how the chain of command shakes out at the edge of nowhere. And inside a place called the Silvent Academy, a young saboteur is being trained — patiently, deliberately — to murder her own family.
I wrote it as an ensemble on purpose. There's no single chosen one standing in the middle with a sword. There's an eleven-year-old girl who walked out of a Ministry compound carrying proof of six thousand murders. There's a sergeant who watched his own captain commit six thousand more. There are admirals and saboteurs and revolutionaries, and the thing quietly connecting all of them is an ancient alien station — sixty kilometers of dead architecture older than any empire drifting past it.
All of them are pointed at that station. None of them know it yet.
Who this one is for
Let me save you some time.
If you read the big, ambitious, politically dense end of science fiction — Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire, Yoon Ha Lee, Alastair Reynolds — this is built on that wavelength. Multiple points of view. Factions with real motives instead of cardboard villainy. The slow, cold dread of a system that grinds people up because grinding people up is the thing systems do.
It's fleets and faith and war on a galactic scale, but the parts I care about are the small ones — the child soldier, the bodyguard who never signed up for any of this, the officer following orders she already knows are wrong. The empires are the backdrop. The people losing themselves inside the empires are the actual book.
Fair warning, because I'd rather you know going in: this is not a gentle read. There's war, and there are children inside that war. Political manipulation, terrorism, hard ground with no clean answer waiting at the bottom of it. If multi-thread sci-fi that takes its politics seriously is your thing, you'll be at home here. If you want a tight, single-hero adventure, this is the wrong door — and no hard feelings.
Why it's free right now
Straight answer: it's the first book in a series, and taking the price off the front door is the best way I know to introduce one.
A free first book is a handshake. You risk nothing. You read a complete, full-length novel — it ends where it's meant to end, this isn't a ninety-page bait — and if my stuff isn't for you, you've lost a couple of evenings and we part as friends. If it is for you, you've found a saga, and probably an author with a lot of other shelves worth a look.
I'd rather earn a reader that way than sell a stranger something they're not sure they want.
How to grab it — and the one thing to watch
The window is June 30 through July 4, 2026. Five days. After midnight on the 4th it goes back to its normal price, so if you want it free, get it inside the window.
It's a Kindle ebook, and you don't need a Kindle device — the free Kindle app on your phone, tablet, or laptop reads it fine. Click through and make sure the price says $0.00 before you hit buy. Free promos sometimes take an hour or two to flip live right at the start, so if it still shows a price early on the 30th, give it a little time and check back.
One ask, and it's the only one: if you read it and you've got thirty seconds, leave a review. It doesn't have to be an essay. A star rating and one honest line about whether the story pulled you in does more for a book like this than any ad I could buy. Reviews are how the next reader finds it.
A little about the rest of what I do
If you're new here, Graveyard of Empires is one corner of a bigger sandbox.
Most of my catalog runs darker and closer to the ground — religious horror, supernatural thrillers, and a sprawling apocalyptic series called World on Fire. And I build voice games for Alexa, which is the other half of my week. If you like dread, bad odds, and choices that cost something, that side might scratch the same itch the books do. Next time you're near an Echo, "Alexa, open Darkness Falls" gets you a survival-horror adventure you play entirely out loud.
But start with the free book. That's the easy yes.
A galaxy full of empires built their power on the same machinery, and a boy with nothing in his head might be the thing that finally breaks it. For five days at the end of June, you can find out how it starts for free.
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