"Easily one of the best sci-fi titles I've read this year, and one of the strongest space opera books I've read in ages. It is, in short, phenomenal!"

Michael Patrick Hicks, author of the DRMR Series

"I consider it a privilege to follow the development of a rare talent. Lucas Bale will become one the SF genre's outstanding writers."

Amazon 5-Star Review

If war shapes the universe, truth destroys it.

A criminal becomes a leader, hiding a tiny colony of survivors from the savagery of twisted men.

A smuggler harbours refugees from a brutal attack on their defenceless village.

A young boy, wracked by loss, now seeks revenge.

A servant of the Magistratus, a lawman who once believed in justice, searches for the truth behind the planet his masters will kill to hide.

A stim-addicted navigator, haunted by her past, wants answers. Why she was chosen to ride with a salvage crew destined to die in a remote, nameless part of space.

And a spy is blackmailed into informing against those he serves. What he knows could bring about the end of the Republic.

All will be drawn together by hidden forces, and their lives shattered by cataclysmic events they can neither predict... nor escape.

A Shroud of Night and Tears is the third book in a longer tale spanning four volumes. The award-winning Beyond the Wall series is gripping, epic space opera, written as hard science-fiction. It is the story of humanity's future and the discovery of the truth of its past.

**

From the Author

A Shroud of Night and Tears is the third book in a longer tale spanning four volumes, inspired by the classic science fiction I have always loved. It is space opera with a hard science fiction edge.

The final book, Into A Silent Darkness, closes out the series and is set to be published in late Fall 2015. This first release edition of A Shroud of Night and Tears, along with the new edition of Defiance, contains a What Has Gone Before summary to help you stay up to date with the plot strands in previous books. As I have previously said, I hope that fans of Banks, Heinlein, Hamilton, Reynolds, even James S. A. Corey, will all find something to love in this series.

About the Author

Lucas Bale writes the sort of intense, gripping science-fiction thrillers which make you miss your train. Stories which dig into what makes us human and scrape at the darkness which hides inside every one of us. His bestselling debut novel, THE HERETIC, is the gateway to the award-winning BEYOND THE WALL series, an epic hard science-fiction space opera about the future of humanity and the discovery of the truth of its past. He wasn't always a writer. He was a criminal lawyer for fifteen years before he discovered crime doesn't pay and turned to something which actually pays even less. No one ever said he was smart, but at least he's happy. He blushes when people mention him in the same sentence as Iain M. Banks or George R. R. Martin, bless him.