First Comes Death

by Avrah C. Baren

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Pub Date 15 Apr 2024 | Archive Date 1 May 2024

Chaos Monster Publishing LLC

General Fiction (Adult) | LGBTQIA | Sci Fi & Fantasy

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Description

A power for every death…

When a black hole anomaly rewrites the rules of life and death, Dina resurrects from a fatal crash into the Chesapeake with an uncontrollable tie to water. Trapped in a cycle of vanishing and reappearing across the world at the water's whim, all Dina wants is to rid herself of this connection and have control of her life again. But with every new resurfacing, it becomes clear she has a worse crisis on her hands: she’s being followed by a monster.

Drowning may not be a natural cause of death, but neither is murder. And when Ivy resurrects with the ability to produce bone daggers from her own body, she’s hungry for revenge. But between her distrust of her new, supposed allies, puzzling encounters with a woman with powers of her own, and the soul devouring creature on their tail, attaining vengeance is looking a lot more difficult than dying in the first place.

As Dina and Ivy’s inexplicable bond pulls them together time and again, they find something neither expected in their afterlife: someone worth living for. But they’ll have to find a way to annihilate the monster at their heels before time runs out on their second lives. Because without another anomaly to bring them back, this time death will have its due.

A power for every death…

When a black hole anomaly rewrites the rules of life and death, Dina resurrects from a fatal crash into the Chesapeake with an uncontrollable tie to water. Trapped in a cycle...

Advance Praise

I devoured First Comes Death in two days. A riveting, fast-paced sci-fi with sapphics and superpowers and existential threats.

Baren has such active writing, it's impossible to look away, their prose perfectly crafted to each character's POV. Ivy's chapters are sharp and emotionally brutal. Dina's voice is ever moving. I utterly fell for both of them from the second I met them. I love Dina's clear-headedness, her Jewishness, her resilience in the face of confusion and fear. I love Ivy's entire arc, including the deep backstory of what she went through and the agency she learned through sweat and blood before the book even begins. (I also love Ivy's terrible handwriting, don't we all have a lesbian in our lives who can't write legibly?) Dina and Ivy's arcs are quite different, while intersecting in the best of ways, which makes for a compelling and satisfying romance fresh with consensual sex scenes and yearning cross-continental phonecalls.

Read this book for the excellently executed found family trope, the "I will always find you" romance, the cinematic action and globetrotting settings, the corporeal and elemental superpowers, the astronomy metaphors and nerdy side characters, and of course the terrifying monster that will keep you reading like it keeps Dina and Ivy running.

This is the perfect debut for a wildly imaginative new author. If First Comes Death, I can't wait to see What Comes Next from Avrah C. Baren!

Thank you to the author for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I devoured First Comes Death in two days. A riveting, fast-paced sci-fi with sapphics and superpowers and existential threats.

Baren has such active writing, it's impossible to look away, their prose...