TL;DR Review: Bloody, gritty, action-packed, and…heartwarming? The novel I didn’t know my year was missing!
Synopsis:
WARDOGS ARE BORN TO DIE.
In the final days of the Demon Empire a lone wardog goes in search of the answer to the only question she cares Who murdered her mate?
Utterly unqualified to solve a mystery, Dogged Determination has but one She never, ever gives up.
From the heart of a massive empire to the deepest foreboding jungles, Dogged is an unstoppable force of will.
Full Review:
I’ve always associated Michael R. Fletcher’s works with GRIMDARK (yes, all caps), so going into Dogged, I was expecting blood and guts and gore. And boy, did I get it—but also so much more.
The story opens with our heroine, a human-canine hybrid known only as Dogged, marching with her fellow war dogs toward a portal that will disgorge them onto an enemy planet to be unleashed in bloody conquest for their Emperor. Only something goes terribly wrong: the portal closes right in front of her eyes, literally shearing her mate in half. (There’s all the blood and guts I was expecting.)
Dogged is determined to find out why this happened—easier to go hunting an enemy than to feel her pain—and sets off into the Imperial Palace to ask questions of the wizards and demonologists to track down the culprit. What she finds leads to a pursuit that spans an entire continent, leading her to cross oceans, trek through brutal jungles, and face down enemies human, monstrous, and hellish.
Dogged has a character very similar to Drax from Guardians of the Galaxy. Largely well-meaning but with very little in the way of social graces and nuanced understanding of the world, she is more than willing to crack heads (literally) and tear off limbs (more of that blood I mentioned) to get the answers she seeks.
But the farther into the story we go, the more we begin to see that yes, it’s solving a weird and terrible murder mystery, and yes, we’re going to find ourselves in all sorts of delightfully violent situations, but in reality, it’s a story about processing grief and finding a way to move forward after loss.
Dogged’s stubborn determination to find the one responsible for her mate’s death allows her to push her grief and pain to the back of her mind, but only for so long. Eventually, she is forced to confront it—and she does so thanks to the humans who become part of her pack. There is plenty more loss and suffering to come, but by the end, she is no longer the single-minded Dogged we met at the beginning of the story.
This ended up being one of my favorite indie reads of 2025, and showed me just how much I’ve been missing out with by not reading everything the author has written—a mistake I intend to rectify in 2026. If you want bloody action, heartwarming character growth, spilling guts and breaking hearts, grim twists and tear-jerking moments of goodness and decency, Dogged is the book I cannot recommend highly enough.
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