Cover of Witch of Talera

A friend of mine, Steve Harris, found this picture of the cover to Witch of Talera at The Book Place here.

It looks great to me. Each cover is darker than the last, which is kind of true for the contents of the books as well. I'm happy.

In other news, I started and finished James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice yesterday, and now I'm into his Double Indemnity. Although the opening line of "Postman" is great, there are some snags in the first couple of pages. At one point it looks like the main male character is talking to some guy who has car trouble in the Kitchen but it turns out to be the main female character. And the main male character seems to jump to the conclusion that the woman is Mexican even though nothing is set up for this and she is married to a guy who is clearly Greek. But once I got through those relatively minor snags I was hooked and raced through the book. You can definitely see where Cain's influence on the development of noir fiction comes from. Personally, I didn't think his characters were particularly realistic, certainly not as realistic as John D. MacDonald's, say, but they were fascinating nevertheless.

I also finished reading The Heroin Diaries by Nikki Sixx of the heavy metal band Motley Crue. It was pretty fascinating but I'd like to have heard more about how he still managed to write songs during his "gone to Heroin" days. It's basically the story of a year in Sixx's life when he was at the height of his drug addictions, and is taken from actual diaries he kept at the time. Interesting from a psychological perspective and very honest, even to the point where the reader is likely to say, "you dumb ass, what were you thinking?" I found it a worthwhile read, better than Tommyland but not as good as The Dirt, both of which were about the Crue.