Grave Empire by Richard Swan

TL;DR: Yes, yes. This was an incredibly horrific, fun ride.
Source: NetGalley, thank you so much!

Plot: We see a world ending problem approached from several angles in a fantastic exploration of the world and it’s issues.
Characters: I loved all of them. Even the bad one that clearly was not a good person. I still loved his PoV.
Setting: This world is absolutely great. I feel silly for sleeping on this author’s work.
Fantasy: A great, developed, and tight world. This felt so well shaped. I want so much more.

Summary:

A new age of exploration and innovation has dawned, and the Empire of the Wolf stands to take its place as the foremost power in the known world. Glory and riches await.

But dark days are coming. A mysterious plague has broken out in the pagan kingdoms to the north, while in the south, the Empire’s proxy war in the lands of the wolfmen is weeks away from total collapse. 

Worse still is the message brought to the Empress by two heretic monks, who claim to have lost contact with the spirits of the afterlife. The monks believe this is the start of an ancient prophecy heralding the end of days—the Great Silence. 

It falls to Renata Rainer, a low-ranking ambassador to an enigmatic and vicious race of mermen, to seek answers from those who still practice the arcane arts. But with the road south beset by war and the Empire on the brink of supernatural catastrophe, soon there may not be a world left to save…

Thoughts:

Richard Swan’s first trilogy was a hit with so many friends and fellow reviewers and I sadly just didn’t get to it. I am now kicking myself. Grave Empire has put his skills on full display for me and I love it. It’s such a well drawn and detailed world. Characters I both love and hate in the full range, and a plot that I ate up with a spoon.

This is the kind of world ending plot I can get behind. The dead have fallen silent, and some parts of the world are suffering from disembodied screaming. Another part of the world has a plague sweeping across the country, and not the kind you think. Three PoV characters take us to explore those and the world at large. I cannot get over how well done these three characters were and how well everything knitted together in the end.

Truly if you want a fantasy that has been measured and executed to near perfection I think this is the one. The attention to detail and how everything fits together is so impressive. And the ending? The last scene! Absolutely blew my mind. Truly, I can’t recommend this enough.