The previous excerpts from upcoming finale Whom Gods Shall Fear were brief, but this one is possibly the one many of you have been waiting for!

The murderous Maber Castigon is worryingly popular, but who am I to judge?
Here is a whole Deep-damned scene from his flashback chapters...

A minor update has been issued today for From Shattered Stars.

• Language clarification in Chapter 1.
• Edits to Chapter 2 to clarify that Maber Castigon was transferred from ICS Disputer to ICS Night's Shadow, following the thwarted boarding attempt on Disputer.
• Minor dialogue addition in Chapter 12 to show the characters did in fact notice that infant Shaeld Hratha either lack camouflage, or do not camouflage themselves instinctively.

​Updates have been delivered for the Kindle edition (now rev. 1.4), as well as the current imprints of the paperback and hard cover editions. The paper versions are now live for all new customers.

The Kindle version is live for new customers, and available as a free update for existing customers.
You can check for waiting updates on your "Manage my Devices and Content" page, accessible from the Kindle section of your local Amazon site: UK Customers ↗︎ • USA Customers ↗︎

As I mentioned previously, refreshed versions of the current novels (volumes 1–4 at time of writing) will be released soon. The plan is to release them all together for both the Kindle and paperback editions.

Books 2–4 will only be getting minor tweaks and corrections — nothing major needs changing. The files for the paperbacks, Kindle individual titles, and Kindle boxed set versions will be getting a hard reset to the "master version" of their respective texts (I've noticed slight discrepancies between the editions, thanks to a sloppy workflow.) The rear covers of the paperbacks will also be tweaked to make them look a bit more professional.

However Steal from the Devil has had a massive overhaul. I consider this the fourth edition, and some of you won't like this but there's... like... more material. I know, I know, I thought I was making tweaks and I guess I just got carried away. What I can say is that the longest new passages have all been character-based additions with the exception of the climax which gets some more action.

I will make sure Amazon KDP pushes the refreshed SFTD as a free update to Kindle customers. For paperback customers, you'll have three options:

1. Buy a new paperback (don't worry, it'll be the same size and cover style as the current one).
2. Ignore the changes — no plot has been altered so nothing that follows on from SFTD is affected.

So what has changed in Steal from the Devil? Here are some examples:

• The entire first chapter (intro to Hammer, Santani, and Caden) has now been restructured to reduce the choppiness of it all.
• Chapters 18 and 19 were swapped for pacing reasons.
• The super-long chapter 20 was split into two, creating Chp. 20 "Hammerfall" and Chp. 21 "Light the Dark".
• The order of scenes in the last three chapters has been rearranged to improve the flow of action and make the pacing far better.
• The climactic confrontation is no longer just a case of finding Morlum, having a quick chat, then shooting something real quick. A lot more is said, the tension is raised considerably, and a lot more actually happens.
• Maber Castigon is fleshed out slightly more, and we get to read a little about the way he sees the world.
• Euryce Eilentes is also fleshed out more, and we learn things which preface her arc in the later books.
• Bruiser has been given a bit more of a role, seeing as we all love him so. 
• Some very sneaky foreshadowing has been made more obvious.
• Mobile Air and Ground Assault (MAGA) has been changed to Conventional Air and Ground Assault (CAGA), as it will now be known across all books and supporting materials.
• "Skinprint" is now written as "skin-print", to aid people whose first language is not English. I mean they deserve some chance, right?
• Significant numbers of tweaks and edits to sentence structure, grammar, etc.
• Improved typography and punctuation has been modernised.

Regular visitors might have noticed that the previously mentioned character pictures have been undergoing rapid and iterative improvements. They're now available for all human main and secondary characters, and higher resolution images are replacing the pictures which were first uploaded.

The web site has been lavished with attention this week. In the past day, the following changes have gone live:

• Voice and Maber Castigon got their own character pages under the Main Characters category.
• Pages referencing them were linked (and some links to renamed pages were fixed too — please report any broken links).
• Biology notes were added to the Viskr and Shaeld Hratha pages.
• The Books section was reorganised so that main novels and expansion episodes come under their own sections.
• A section was added to the FAQ to assist those wanting to update their Kindle editions.
• Unnecessary duplicate headings were pruned throughout the site.