Cover Reveal & About Blurb: Best Served Cold – a story about revenge

Coming soon – a story about revenge – “Best Served Cold” by Christina Engela!

As I recently promised to fans and readers on Facebook, here is the formal cover-reveal (click to enlarge) and the about blurb for my latest novel “Best Served Cold”.

I know what you might be thinking – I’ve only just released four new titles at the end of January – how could I be releasing another new book so soon?

To tell you the whole story, “Best Served Cold” isn’t completely new. It’s never been published before – that’s true – but it was originally written by me back in 1991-92, around the same time that I wrote “Blachart”.

What I’ve really done – in February this year – was to take the original text (which had been typed on an electronic typewriter by my mother back in 1992) scan them and run them through an OCR app (which I did in 2009) – and edit it. Of course the fact that it had been typed previously made the job so much easier, believe me (thanks, Ma)! Otherwise I’d have been stuck trying to unravel my own hieroglyphs from the end of my school days!

For many years “Best Served Cold” – then titled “Galaxii” – yes, what I named my first series after – remained a mass of handwritten scribbled A4 pages and A5 sized notebooks filed away in a lever-arch file, gathering dust – except when I needed to reference something from it while writing other books! I drew on it to set the background story for the Galaxii series. My short stories “Beyond”, “The Devils In The Sky” (in “Space Sucks!”), “Broken Promises”, “The Broken-Tipped Sword” (in “Space Sucks Too!” – as well as the novels in Galaxii – and to an extent, even in the Quantum series all in some small way reference the story ultimately told in “Best Served Cold”!

As a little aside, I have my Querida – Kay (a.k.a. Wendy) to thank for inspiring the new title! The title “Best Served Cold” was her contribution – otherwise it might’ve been something less inspiring like “The Broken Sword” or something like that! All jokes aside though, I am very proud of the end-result! You might not understand why – but over the last 20 years or so, I’ve often referred back to this story and longed to actually finish it! It took numerous false starts and four other previous attempts to redraft the story as you can see below in the screenshot of my writing archive for that title!

The book is now twice as long as it was back then – just a touch shy of 59,000 words – and as I’ve rewritten every sentence, changed names and characters – and even the ending, it is essentially a brand new book co-written by 19 year old me and 47 year-old me! It is currently in the process of being test-read and there will probably be another round of editing before it is released – which means it could end up being a bit longer too – and as always, I’ll be keeping you all appraised on progress!

“Best Served Cold” isn’t part of a series, so it won’t be branded as a prequel to the Galaxii series. It is set around a century or more before “Blachart”, and sets the historical background for the series and nothing more, so “Best Served Cold” stands perfectly fine on its own as a tale of adventure in space – and revenge of course, which is a dish best served cold!

Below is the “about” blurb or book description to whet your appetites! 😉

The “About”:

‘Revenge. Getting even. Fighting back. Whatever it’s called, it’s supposed to warrant two graves – or at least, that’s how one old saying went – usually, in the case of mere mortal Human beings. In the case of the Human race as a whole, it was less about that and more about survival.

Having just survived the Big Nuke twenty years before, a recovering Earth just beginning to reap the rewards of interplanetary colonization was suddenly attacked by an alien race that didn’t communicate, didn’t negotiate – and seemed absolutely intent on taking the entire solar system for itself.

The only option the war-weary people of Earth, Mars and Luna had, was to beat their plough-shares back into swords – and fight back! In the first six months, the best the fledgling warriors of the Earth Defense Fleet could manage, was to push the savage Gimp back to the asteroid belt. For four long years since then, the best they could do was to maintain the stalemate, with each side waiting for the other to make a fatal mistake. Sooner or later, the war would end, one way – or the other.

For Francis Talon – Commander In Chief of a strike force intended to bring the aliens to their knees, it was the culmination of a journey of self-glorification and ambition leading all the way back to the L.A. mafia and the killing of Marian Mureau’s parents.

For Alex Nikolls, a pilot fighting in the blackness of space on an almost daily basis, it couldn’t come soon enough! For Marian Mureau, it meant more than just the end of the war – it signified the end of a life-long vendetta!’

All material copyright © Christina Engela, 2020.