Toll The Hounds: The Malazan Book of the Fallen 8 - Tapa dura

In Darujhistan, the saying goes that Love and Death shall arrive together, dancing...

It is summer and the heat is oppressive, yet the discomfiture of the small rotund man in the faded red waistcoat is not entirely due to the sun. Dire portents plague his nights and haunt the city's streets like fiends of shadow. Assassins skulk in alleyways but it seems the hunters have become the hunted. Hidden hands pluck the strings of tyranny like a fell chorus. Strangers have arrived, and while the bards sing their tragic tales, somewhere in the distance can be heard the baying of hounds. All is palpably not well. And in Black Coral too, ruled over by Anomander Rake Son of Darkness, something is afoot - memories of ancient crimes surface, clamouring for revenge, so it would seem that Love and Death are indeed about to make their entrance...

This is epic fantasy at its most imaginative, storytelling at its most exciting.

It is said that Hood, Lord of Death, gathered unto himself a host of gods, in a place beyond the reach of mortals. It is said that Hood waits at the end of every plot, every scheme, each grandiose ambition. But this time it is different. This time he's there at the beginning...

Darujhistan swelters in the summer heat and seethes with dire portents, unsettling rumours and insidious whispers. Strangers have arrived, a murderer is at work, and past tyrannies might be reawakening. The retired Bridgeburners of K'rul's Bar have been singled out by the city's assassins with deadly consequences, and a small, rotund, red-waistcoat-clad man, while dismayed by his expanding girth, knows that this is the very least of his worries. For somewhere in the distance can be heard the baying of hounds.

And far away in Black Coral, the Tiste Andii rule with seeming indifference. At a massive barrow outside the city, thousands gather - adherents to the cult of the Redeemer, a once-mortal man whose virtue and honour seem defenceless against the twisted ambitions of his followers.

So, as Hood stands at the beginning of a conspiracy that will shake the cosmos, at its end, there waits another. For Anomander Rake, Son of Darkness, the time has come to right an ancient and terrible wrong ...

With this epic new chapter, Steven Erikson's awesome fantasy adventure enters its final, climactic stages.