His battles with the dead have left him crushed and broken. But his nightmares have only just begun… Exorcist Akaran DeHawk is desperate to recover his sanity. With a leg shattered beyond repair and holed up in an asylum, he’s plagued by visions of places he's been and people he's slain. But his demons aren’t finished with him yet, and between butchered bodies in his dreams and grotesquely mutilated corpses in the street, he's cursed with the knowledge that the killer may not be human... and nobody is willing to believe him. Convinced the shadows in his nightmares are real and are lurking among the 'Safest City in the Kingdom,' Akaran battles a disbelieving populace as he hunts down the truth. But stripped of magic and with his own mind on the brink of chaos, he could be racing headfirst into darkness… Insanity's Respite is the captivating first book in the Auramancer's Exorcism dark fantasy quadrilogy. If you like brutal heroes, good guys that aren't, a world you can get lost in, and bloody nightmares that just won't quit, then you'll love Joshua E. B. Smith's unforgiving epic. Buy Insanity's Respite today to dive down a rabbit hole of terror. In all truth, plotting out Respite was a major change from the previous books - and a change from most of the fantasy I've read or seen in recent memory. A lot of time, you have a story that begins with, "and the hero was injured," and then, "the hero was cured," with very little in-between. In IR , I got to delve hard into, "the hero can't be cured, and honestly, doesn't want to be bothered right now." That's a major change of pace from what I've written before. On a personal note, I've suffered from long-term injuries at various points of my life, and it's nice to tell a story from the viewpoint of someone that - quite frankly - does not care about what's going on because he's hurting. The fact that circumstances demand he be involved is beside the point. Insanity's Respite is written as both a continuation of The Snowflakes Trilogy, but also as a start point for anyone not familiar with the series. Will you get more from this book if you're familiar with the events in Snowflakes in Summer , Dead Men in Winter , or Favorite Things ? Of course. But if you haven't picked them up, and thought this book looked really interesting, then you're completely fine to start the series here. Either way, I had a lot of fun writing it. It's a little slower than some of my other books, but, I got to really expand on the world and build something really special with this. I hope that you enjoy it, and I hope that you stick around for the books that'll follow. Welcome to the safest place in the Kingdom. Try not to trip over the bodies. ~Joshua E. B. Smith Hailing from Vienna, WV, Joshua is a fantasy horror author by dayand a cosplayer-for-charity by night. The world of the Saga is a hugeplace where good things happen to bad people - and the good people arequestionable at best. That said, he's long believed that the bestfantasy has a good dose of reality in it, and what's more realistic than good guys that aren't always good people