Synopsis
Tomas Piety has been many things: soldier, priest, gangster…and spy. As Tomas’s power grows, the nobility better watch their backs, in this dark and gritty epic fantasy series.
People are weak, and the poorer and more oppressed they are, the weaker they become–until they can’t take it anymore. And when they rise up…may the gods help their oppressors.
When Tomas Piety returned from the war, he just wanted to rebuild his empire of crime with his gang of Pious Men. But his past as a spy for the Queen’s Men drew him back in and brought him more power than he ever imagined.
Now, with half of his city in ashes and the Queen’s Men at his back, the webs of political intrigue stretch out from the capital to pull Tomas in. Dannsburg is calling.
In Dannsburg the nobility fight with words, not blades, but the results are every bit as bloody. In this pit of beasts, Tomas must decide once and for all whether he is truly the people’s champion…or just a priest of lies.
Review
“Ailsa understood battle shock, I had to allow. I wondered why that was and who she might have worked with during the war. It wasn’t impossible that she had been there, for all I knew. The Queen’s Men were knights, after all. Not the armored sort who fronted the charge of heavy cavalry, no, but knights nonetheless. There was more than one sort of hero in a war, I knew that much.”
So I am well and truly bitten by the one more chapter syndrome with this series and I’m writing this review after having crossed 50 pages in book 3. It is so good. Coming back to book 2, I will stand by what I said in my book 1 review- this is actually better than Peaky Blinders.
The story opens with Tomas Piety dealing with the immediate aftermath of the climax in book 1- in the city of Ellinsburg, within his mind, and in his marriage. Since it’s book 2, I can’t reveal much in the interest of avoiding spoilers but the changes he goes through internally feel very real for his character arc and in turn makes the whole world and the story very real because we are viewing it entirely from his POV.
The first quarter of the book is indeed very slow because of the reasons above but once Tomas and party reach the city of Dannsburg, the book completely shifts into a new gear. It is still slow but we get a lot of politicking and I absolutely dig that. To me, it stopped feeling slow from then and I couldn’t get enough. Every time I paused the book to focus on real life, I wanted to do nothing but pick it back up. Once again I finished about 90% of the book in just two days. It reads incredibly fast and as a precaution I’ve ordered both book 3 and 4 now.
Tommy Shelby from Peaky Blinder is not really a Gary Stu, but he does go into every battle recklessly and somehow always ends up winning it because he has received some new information from somewhere even after making terrible strategic mistakes. It gives him this perfect look at times but in this book, Tomas Piety doesn’t have any of that and we actually watch him suffer, go through shit and learn. The way he is such a monster when it comes to gangster business but is completely out of depth when he is put into a new city and has to play politics in high society is brilliant. The reader gets to watch him stumble, fall, learn, rise, and adapt to the new game is a treat- once again proving that character growth is the most important part in hooking the reader.
My tiny complaint is that the whole scope of the story would have become even broader if we got a few chapters from Ailsa or Billy’s POV. Having said that, I did really like everything about this book. Once again, it has a super explosive ending, and the place each character ends up left me wanting to start book 3 immediately.
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