Today I am so pleased to welcome Don Allmon to Joyfully Jay. Don has come to talk to us about his latest release, The Burning Magus. He has also brought along a fun giveaway. Please join me in giving Don a big welcome!

Minor Characters in THE BURNING MAGUS: DUKE

Howdy all! And welcome to the blog tour for book three of the Blue Unicorn trilogy, THE BURNING MAGUS!

THE BURNING MAGUS is a cyberpunk/fantasy Ocean’s 11. Or it would be if Danny and Rusty had been an orc and an elf, they’d been lovers, and the Bellagio casino had been an evil wizard’s tower.

If you’ve been following the series, BURNING MAGUS brings the whole gang together: JT and Austin, Comet and Buzz, the Blue Unicorn and Roan.

It’s the final book in the series where the heroes get their HEA, the villains their come-uppance, and well… I won’t spoil everything.

And to celebrate, we’re gonna have a drawing! The lucky winner gets a copy of BIG GAY ICE CREAM [https://biggayicecream.com/] by Bryan Petroff and Douglas Quint. To enter, leave a comment below with your email address, and at the end of the tour I’ll draw a name! Good luck everyone!

Minor characters never get enough attention. (Of course if they did, then they wouldn’t be minor, would they?) So I’d like to introduce y’all to some of the minor characters in The Burning Magus.

This stop on the tour, I’m gonna talk about DUKE:

Probably there are reasons I’m a prick. Only child, zero-gen-orc, bad-parents reasons. They don’t matter. I’m an adult, and I could choose to not be a prick if I wanted, but I don’t. […] I’m exactly the person you imagine me to be. –Duke

I think once you get older, you start writing the same characters over and over. Certain ideas get fixed in your head and become obsessions. For me, Duke is one of those obsessions: an older gay man, alone in some ways, not in others, and deeply, uncomfortably entrenched in a brand of power that he both resents and thrives in. If I were ever going to write a billionaire BSDM story, Duke would be my hero.

Duke was born before magic returned to the world and became an orc when he was seventeen, a week before prom night. So much for being crowned Homecoming King.

He joined the army (one of the few jobs people trusted orcs to do back then), and thrived there for all the wrong reasons. He built up a network of unsavory contacts across the globe, and when he retired he created Ironfang Enterprises, a private security company and used everything he had learned (including his cynicism and bitterness) to become spectacularly wealthy.

In a word, Duke is fierce. He has fierce loves and fierce hates. He suffers fierce guilts and calls up fierce justifications for the things he does. He does nothing half-assed. He’s my world’s Don Corleone.

He is JT’s financial patron in THE GLAMOUR THIEVES. He’s Comet’s friend and employer (and Buzz’s nemesis) in APOCALYPSE ALLEY. And in THE BURNING MAGUS Duke is…

Well, Duke is “home.”

He’s everything about “home”: All the complicated good and bad of it. The place you want to escape from when you’re there. The place you want to return to when you’re gone. The place you belong.

He might be “minor” but Duke is one of my favorite characters I’ve ever written. I hope you love him as much as I do.

Blurb

Love can make a good crime go bad.

JT was a perfectly happy orc building cars in the Arizona desert until his old friend and sometimes lover Austin showed up and talked him into one last crime. Now “one last crime” has snowballed. With a new team of thieves — a supersoldier, a hacker, a driver, a graffiti artist, and a seafaring wizard — JT and Austin are determined to free an artificial intelligence from the dungeon of the Burning Magus.

For JT, this job is more than a prison break; it’s a do-over of The Job That Went Bad two years ago, the catastrophe in which JT lost his closest friend and then chose to abandon everything, even Austin. Maybe this time no one will die. Maybe this time JT can return to Arizona and bury his old life for good.

Except Austin won’t be buried. After two years alone, Austin knows he wants JT — not just as a partner in crime, but as the lover he always should have been. Maybe this time they won’t make the same mistakes, especially when it comes to each other.

Bio

In his night job, Don Allmon writes science fiction, fantasy, and romance. In his day job, he’s an IT drone. He holds a master of arts in English literature from the University of Kansas and wrote his thesis on the influence of royal hunting culture on medieval werewolf stories. He’s a fan of role-playing games, both video and tabletop. He has lived all over from New York to San Francisco, but currently lives on the prairies of Kansas with many animals.

Connect with Don:

• Website: www.donallmon.com
• Twitter: @dallmon
• Pinterest

Giveaway

To celebrate the release of The Burning Magus one lucky person will win a copy of the cookbook BIG GAY ICE CREAM by Bryan Petroff and Douglas Quint! Leave a comment with your contact info to enter the contest. Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on November 24, 2018. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. entries. Thanks for following along, and don’t forget to leave your contact info!

• By entering the giveaway, you’re confirming that you are at least 18 years old.
• Winners will be selected by random number. No purchase necessary to win. The number of eligible entries received determines the odds of winning.
• If you win, you must respond to my email within 48 hours or another winner may be chosen. Please make sure that your spam filter allows email from Joyfully Jay.
• Winners may be announced on the blog following the contest. By entering the contest you are agreeing to allow your name to be posted and promoted as the contest winner by Joyfully Jay.
• Prizes will be distributed following the giveaway either by Joyfully Jay or the person/organization donating the prize.
• All book prizes are in electronic format unless otherwise specified.
• By entering you are agreeing to hold Joyfully Jay harmless if the prize or giveaway in some way negatively impacts the winner.
• Readers may only enter once for each contest.  Duplicate entries for the same giveaway will be ignored. In the event of technical problems with the blog during the contest, every effort will be made to extend the contest deadline to allow for additional entries.
• Void where prohibited by law.