Sudden Death comes out on Monday.
Before it does, I want to answer a question I get asked more than any other about this series. Why polo?
The sport of kings
Most people in America have never watched a polo match. I hadn't either, not properly, until I started writing about it. Growing up in England, though, I knew exactly what polo meant, because it was always on the news with a royal attached to it.
Prince Philip played it for years. King Charles played well into middle age, and Princes William and Harry still turn out for charity matches. The game itself is ancient. It came out of Persia, spread across Asia, and was picked up by British cavalry officers in India in the nineteenth century. They brought it home, wrote down the rules, and gave it a club in west London called Hurlingham. Somewhere along the way it got its nickname: the sport of kings.
It crossed the Atlantic in 1876, when a newspaper publisher named James Gordon Bennett Jr. came back from England with mallets and balls and an idea. In America there was no royal family to attach it to, so it attached itself to the next best thing, which was money. Old money. Long Island estates, private clubs, family names on the trophies, and a string of horses that costs more to keep than most people's houses.
That's the world of the Windward Cup. It's set on the Texas Gulf Coast, in a fictional enclave called Harrow's Point, where the clubs are old, the families are older, and everyone knows whose grandfather built the stands.
Then I dropped a broke ranch hand into the middle of it.
Mason Caldwell has never held a mallet. What he can do is ride, better than anyone at the club, because he learned on horses that would throw him the second he lied to them. Julian is the opposite. He was born into the club, raised to captain it, and wears the manners like armour. The whole series runs on the gap between those two men, and on what happens when the man with all the graces falls for the one who has none of them.
You don't need to know a single rule of polo to read these books. Everything you need is on the page, and the rest is horses, money, and two men who shouldn't work and do.
What Sudden Death is about
In polo, sudden death is how a tied final ends. One more chukker, and the first goal wins.
This season, it's how everything starts.
There's a death at the Cup, and it isn't an accident. The investigation pulls at every thread in Harrow's Point, and the old families start closing ranks. Julian gets a question he's been avoiding his whole life pushed into his hands, because the name he was given was never really his. Mason is the one who stays. That's all I'll say.
If you've read Line of the Ball and Crossing the Line, this is Julian's book. It's the one I've been building towards since the first chapter of Book 1.
If you're new, start here
You have two ways in.
Stick & Ball is free. It's a short prequel about how a fifteen-year-old with nothing ended up at a Texas ranch, and how he learned to ride a horse nobody else could. It answers the question one reviewer asked me: how does a cowboy get that good that fast? Grab it at eliaskeane.com/landers/free-stick-ball.
Or start with Line of the Ball, which is in Kindle Unlimited. Keep an eye on your inbox next week, because I have something planned for it.
The draft that was twice as long
I'll be honest about something. The first full draft of Sudden Death was more than twice the length of the book coming out on Monday.
There was a story in there I believed in, buried under a lot of words that weren't earning their place. So I took it apart. I cut it, restructured it, wrote whole chapters again from scratch, and went through it line by line until every scene was pulling its weight. Some of my favourite moments in the finished book didn't exist in that first draft. A lot of what did exist is gone, and the book is better for it.
I'm telling you this because I think readers deserve to know that a book doesn't arrive finished. This one fought me, and I'm proud of where it ended up.
This isn't the end
There's one more thing I want to say clearly, because I know some of you have been wondering.
Sudden Death is not the last Windward Cup book.
When I started the series I thought three books would be enough. By the time I'd finished this one, I knew Julian and Mason had more to say. Their story keeps going after Monday, and so do a few threads I've deliberately left open. I don't have dates for you yet. I'll tell you as soon as I do.
One small favour
If you read Sudden Death and it does something for you, please leave a review on Amazon in the first week. It doesn't need to be long, and two honest sentences is plenty. Those early reviews decide whether new readers ever find a book like this, and they matter more than anything else I could ask you for.
Monday, then. I'll see you at the Cup.
Queer love, every genre, always a happy ending.
Yours, Elias.