Jon Cronshaw reaches 60% of Seeker’s Reckoning, continues Clout Maxxing, plans Ravenglass Origins and finishes He Who Fights with Monsters Book 2.
This week, I’ve reached around 60% of the way through my draft of Seeker’s Reckoning, the third Ravenglass Guardians standalone, and I’ve continued working on Clout Maxxing alongside it.
That’s a big jump from 25% a fortnight ago. You can follow where every book stands on my Project Tracker. Clout Maxxing, my British LitRPG, is now running as a weekly serial on Patreon.
Planning Ravenglass Origins
I’ve also been outlining a potential future project called Ravenglass Origins. This would take the story right back to the very beginning of the kingdom of Ostreich and give me a chance to look at a much earlier period in the history of the Ravenglass Universe.
On the reading side, I’ve just finished book two of He Who Fights with Monsters and I’m having a great time with the series. After bouncing off it earlier in the year, I’m now fully invested and keen to keep going. I talked about giving it a second try in last week’s Author Diary. If you want to try it yourself, Shirtaloon still releases new chapters on Patreon.
Plus, the usual thoughts on writing, reading and life as an indie author.
Listen, Watch and Read
Author Diary goes out every week as a vlog on YouTube and as an author podcast on Spotify. New to my fantasy books? Browse the full library, or grab a free starter library through my newsletter.
Loved Assassin’s Apprentice? Eight fantasy novels for Fitz fans, with royal secrets, secret training, dangerous mentors and characters you will follow anywhere.
Some books you read. Assassin’s Apprentice is a book you live inside.
FitzChivalry Farseer is a royal bastard handed over to his father’s family at six, raised in the stables of Buckkeep and trained in secret to be the king’s hidden knife. Robin Hobb tells his story in his own voice, and by the end you know Fitz as well as you know anyone real.
That is why it is so hard to find the next one. Plenty of fantasy has assassins. Far less of it has what Hobb does: a lonely child at court, a mentor in the shadows whose help comes at a price, slow-burning loyalty, and a hero who pays for every lesson.
The eight books below are the ones I would hand to someone who has just closed Assassin’s Apprentice and wants that feeling again. Some have assassins. Some have courts. All of them have a young person shaped, used and changed by people more powerful than they are.
If you want the closest thing to Fitz and Chade, start here.
Girton Club-foot is apprentice to Merela Karn, the finest assassin in the land. Their latest job turns their trade on its head. Instead of killing someone, they have been hired to stop someone being killed: the heir to the throne, a vicious prince whom half the castle would happily see dead.
Girton goes undercover as a squire, learning to fight in the open while hunting a killer in the shadows. The castle is full of plots, and the closer he gets to the truth, the more dangerous it becomes.
Barker writes the master and apprentice bond with real warmth. Merela is tough, funny and fiercely protective, and Girton’s first-person voice will feel like home to anyone who loved Fitz. The Wounded Kingdom trilogy is complete, too.
Read it if you want an assassin apprentice, a castle full of secrets and a mentor you would follow anywhere.
Vaelin Al Sorna is a boy when his father leaves him at the gates of the Sixth Order, a brotherhood of warrior monks. He is never allowed to go home.
Years later, Vaelin is the most feared warrior in the realm and a prisoner on his way to fight a duel. On the voyage, he tells his story to an imperial chronicler: the brutal training, the brothers he made, and the orders that turned him into a legend he never wanted to be.
Like Assassin’s Apprentice, this is a memoir of a childhood spent being shaped into a weapon. The training years are the heart of the book, and the brotherhood between the novices is beautifully done.
Read it if you loved Fitz’s childhood at Buckkeep and want another boy given away to serve something bigger than himself.
Gen boasted that he could steal anything. Then he proved it, and ended up in the king’s prison.
Now the king’s magus needs a thief. He drags Gen out of his cell and across the country in search of an ancient treasure that could decide the fate of three kingdoms.
The Thief won a Newbery Honor, and it looks like a small, quick adventure. It is not. Gen tells his own story, and he is not telling you everything. The final chapters will send you straight back to the beginning.
The books that follow grow into some of the sharpest political fantasy around, full of court intrigue and painful choices.
Read it if you love a narrator who knows more than he lets on and royal politics that hit hard.
Cazaril was once a courtier and a soldier. Betrayed and sold to the galleys, he comes home broken, wanting nothing more than a quiet job in a kitchen.
Instead, he is made tutor to the young Royesse Iselle, sister of the heir to the throne. The royal family is under a curse, the court is ruled by men who would happily see him dead, and the gods themselves seem to be taking an interest in him.
If what you loved most about Hobb was the court, this is your book. Cazaril is kind, frightened, clever and stubborn, and watching him protect Iselle through the politics of Chalion is a joy. It won the Mythopoeic Award and was a Hugo finalist.
Read it if you want a wounded hero, a dangerous court and loyalty that costs everything.
This one is mine, and Assassin’s Apprentice is one of the books that made me want to write it.
Kat is heir to the Ostreich Empire, and the last thing she wants to do is rule. Her mother is cold. Her sister is a rival. Her only friends are a messenger boy and Witz, a talking wyvern who serves as the Empress’s spymaster and whose help always seems to come with strings attached.
When the rituals of the royal court give Kat a ravenglass blade that wakes to her blood, everything starts to unravel. She begins to dream of things she cannot explain. She starts asking who really killed her father. And before long, she is far from the palace, training in secret with the Guardians under a new name, learning to climb, spy and survive.
If you loved Fitz’s lessons with Chade, the slow unravelling of royal secrets and the feeling of being moved like a piece on a board, this is that story with a princess in Fitz’s place.
The series is told in twenty-one novellas, each one shaped by a card from the tarot’s Major Arcana, and the whole thing is finished. The complete omnibus collects every one, so you can read straight through to the end.
Content note: animal death, self-harm and some dark themes. Sex happens off the page.
Locke Lamora is an orphan sold to a blind priest who is not a priest at all. Father Chains runs a school for thieves beneath a temple, and Locke is his most gifted pupil.
Grown up, Locke leads the Gentleman Bastards, a crew of con artists who rob the nobility of Camorr and break the one rule the city’s crime lord insists on. Then someone starts killing the city’s gang bosses, and Locke’s games turn deadly.
This is lighter on its feet than Hobb, with more swagger and a lot more swearing. But it shares the thing that matters: a found family raised together in secret, and the grief of what happens when that family is threatened.
Read it if you want a clever heist, a hero raised by a criminal mentor and friendships that break your heart. Be aware that the series is not yet finished.
Maia is the half-goblin youngest son of the emperor, unwanted and exiled to a cold country house with a guardian who despises him.
Then an airship crash kills his father and all three of his brothers. At eighteen, Maia is emperor of the elflands, with no training, no allies and a court that never wanted him.
There are no assassins’ lessons here. What there is, and what Hobb readers will recognise, is a lonely young man at the mercy of a court, trying to stay decent while everyone around him plays a game he does not understand. It won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel.
Read it if you want quiet court intrigue and a hero whose kindness is his greatest strength.
In a quiet village inn, a red-haired innkeeper finally agrees to tell the truth about who he was.
He was Kvothe: a travelling performer’s son whose family was murdered, a starving boy on the streets of Tarbean, and the youngest student ever admitted to the University. Over three days, he tells his story to a chronicler, and the legend is very different from the man.
Like Fitz, Kvothe tells his own story looking back, and much of the pleasure is the gap between the boy he was and the man he became.
One warning: the third book has still not been published at the time of writing. Go in knowing the story is unfinished.
Read it if you love a first-person life story told by a narrator haunted by his past.
The best books like Assassin’s Apprentice are not really about killing.
They are about being used. Fitz trained by a great-uncle who cares for him and needs him as a weapon. Girton sent into danger by the woman who saved him. Vaelin handed over by his own father. Kat steered by a wyvern who always seems to know what she will do next.
The blades and the poisons are the surface. Underneath, these are stories about loyalty, loneliness and what a young person becomes when other people decide their purpose for them.
For the closest match to Fitz and Chade, start with Age of Assassins.
For a childhood spent being forged into a weapon, read Blood Song.
For a narrator who is hiding something, pick up The Thief.
For a wounded hero at a dangerous court, try The Curse of Chalion.
For a reluctant princess, a scheming wyvern and a finished twenty-one-part story, begin The Ravenglass Chronicles.
For a crew of thieves who become a family, choose The Lies of Locke Lamora.
For quiet court politics and a kind young ruler, read The Goblin Emperor.
And for a life story told by the legend himself, open The Name of the Wind.
Start With The Fool for Free
Every tarot journey begins with The Fool. So does The Ravenglass Chronicles.
The Fool is the prequel to Kat’s story, and it is part of my free Starter Library: five books, five doors into the Ravenglass Universe, sent straight to your Kindle.
If you are not ready to commit to the full omnibus, this is the place to start.
Looking for coming-of-age fantasy written for adults? Eight novels about growing up with real stakes, hard choices and heroes who pay for every lesson.
Growing up is the oldest story in fantasy. It is not just for teenagers.
A young person leaves home, finds a teacher, learns a power they do not understand, and pays for every mistake. That shape runs from The Hobbit to the latest bestseller.
What changes in adult fantasy is the honesty. The mentors lie. The power costs something. The choices do not come with a right answer, and the hero does not always come out better for having made them.
These eight books are coming-of-age stories written for grown-up readers. They remember what it felt like to be young and certain and wrong, and they do not look away from what it costs to learn.
Ged is a village boy who herds goats on the island of Gont and has a raw gift for magic. He is sent to the school for wizards on Roke, where he is the most talented student of his year and the proudest.
Out of pride and rivalry, he casts a spell he cannot control and lets a shadow loose into the world. The rest of the book is the price of that moment: a young man hunted across the islands of Earthsea by something that wears his own darkness.
It is short and spare, and it was published for young readers in 1968. But it reads differently as an adult. This is a book about arrogance, shame and the long work of facing the worst part of yourself.
Read it if you want the classic magic-school story told with real wisdom.
FitzChivalry Farseer is six years old when he is handed over to his royal father’s family. Nobody quite knows what to do with a king’s bastard, so he is raised in the stables of Buckkeep and quietly trained to be the crown’s hidden knife.
Hobb tells the story in Fitz’s own voice, looking back. You watch a lonely boy grow up among people who love him, need him and use him, often all at once.
No fantasy writer is better at the slow damage of growing up in a court. The assassin training matters, but the heart of the book is Fitz learning who he can trust, and finding out how few people that is.
Read it if you want a coming-of-age story that stays with you for years.
Vasya grows up at the edge of the forest in medieval Rus’, where winter lasts most of the year and the old household spirits still guard the stove and the stable.
She can see them. Her new stepmother can too, and is terrified. When a zealous young priest arrives and turns the village against the old ways, the spirits begin to weaken, and something hungry wakes in the woods.
This is a coming-of-age story about a girl who refuses the only two futures on offer: marriage or the convent. Arden writes snow and firelight and folklore so well that you will want to read it under a blanket. The Winternight trilogy is complete.
Read it if you want a wild, stubborn heroine and a fairy tale with teeth.
Ash falls from the sky. Mist rises every night. And for a thousand years, the Lord Ruler has ruled an empire built on the backs of the enslaved skaa.
Vin is a half-skaa street thief who trusts nobody, because everybody she has ever trusted has hurt her. Then a charismatic rebel named Kelsier discovers that she is Mistborn, able to draw power from metals, and recruits her into a crew planning the greatest heist in history: overthrowing a god.
The magic system is famous, and deservedly so. But what makes the book work is Vin learning, slowly and painfully, that it is possible to belong somewhere. The original Mistborn trilogy is complete.
Read it if you want a guarded heroine, a found family and a heist against an immortal tyrant.
This one is mine, and coming of age is the whole point of it.
The series opens on the morning Kat comes of age in the eyes of the court. Kat is heir to the Ostreich Empire, and the last thing she wants to do is rule. The rituals that follow cost her the gift her late father left her, bind her to a ravenglass blade that wakes to her blood, and leave her promised to a lord three times her age.
Her only friends are a messenger boy and Witz, a talking wyvern who serves as the Empress’s spymaster and whose help always seems to come with strings attached. Before long, Kat is asking who really killed her father, and the answers take her far from the palace, into training with the secretive Guardians.
Across twenty-one novellas, each shaped by a card of the tarot’s Major Arcana, you watch a sheltered, angry girl find out that the world is greyer than she was taught, and that being right is not the same as being able to change anything. Kat makes mistakes. Some of them cost lives. That is what growing up looks like in a brutal empire.
The series is finished, and the complete omnibus collects every novella. Kat’s story then continues with Ace of Swords.
Content note: animal death, self-harm, anxiety and some dark themes. Sex happens off the page.
Rin is a war orphan whose foster family plans to marry her off to an older man. Her only way out is the Keju, the empire-wide exam that decides who gets an education. Nobody expects her to pass.
She does, and wins a place at Sinegard, the most elite military academy in the Nikara Empire. There she is mocked for her dark skin and her accent, finds a strange teacher who introduces her to the shamanic power of the gods, and learns that war is coming.
The first half reads like a school story. The second half does not. Kuang draws on twentieth-century Chinese history, and what Rin becomes by the end is a deliberate, devastating answer to the chosen-one fantasy. The trilogy is complete.
Content note: this is the darkest book on the list, with war atrocities, genocide and drug use.
Read it if you want coming of age as tragedy, and can handle where it goes.
Every ten years, the wizard known as the Dragon chooses a young woman from Agnieszka’s valley to serve him in his tower. Everyone knows he will choose her best friend, Kasia, who is beautiful, brave and good at everything.
He chooses Agnieszka instead.
Clumsy and always muddy, she discovers she has a kind of magic the Dragon cannot understand. Beyond the valley lies the Wood, a corrupted forest that swallows people and sends back something else. Agnieszka will need every scrap of her stubbornness to stand against it.
Novik draws on Polish folklore, and the friendship between Agnieszka and Kasia is the true heart of the book. It is a standalone, and it won the Nebula Award.
Read it if you want a complete story in one book, dark fairy-tale magic and a heroine who wins by being herself.
In the Catenan Republic, power flows upwards. Citizens cede their Will, their strength and energy, to those above them, and the people at the top of the Hierarchy become something close to gods.
Vis Telimus has spent years hiding who he really is: the son of a failed rebellion against that system. When a powerful senator adopts him and sends him into the Academy, the elite school that trains the Republic’s future rulers, Vis must climb a ladder he despises while hunting secrets that could get him killed.
This is a Roman-inspired academy story for adults, full of puzzles, rivalries and moral compromise. It has been one of the most talked-about fantasy novels of recent years. The Hierarchy series is still being written.
Read it if you want a secretive hero, an elite school and a system that is rotten at the core.
Young adult fantasy often promises that the hero will become who they were always meant to be.
Adult coming-of-age fantasy asks a harder question: what if who you become is not who you hoped? Ged has to face his own shadow. Fitz learns that love and use can come from the same person. Rin wins everything and loses herself. Kat discovers that the people guiding her have their own reasons.
These books respect the reader enough to let growing up hurt. That is why they stay with you long after you have grown up yourself.
For the classic magic-school story, start with A Wizard of Earthsea.
For the deepest character study, read Assassin’s Apprentice.
For folklore, winter and a fierce heroine, pick up The Bear and the Nightingale.
For a heist, a found family and a famous magic system, try Mistborn.
For a reluctant princess, a scheming wyvern and a finished twenty-one-part story, begin The Ravenglass Chronicles.
For coming of age as tragedy, brace yourself for The Poppy War.
For a complete story in a single book, choose Uprooted.
And for an elite academy in a rotten republic, open The Will of the Many.
Start With The Fool for Free
Every journey has to start somewhere.
The Fool is the prequel to The Ravenglass Chronicles, and it is part of my free Starter Library: five books, five doors into the Ravenglass Universe, sent straight to your Kindle.
If you are not ready to commit to the full omnibus, this is the place to start.
Jon Cronshaw talks Seeker’s Reckoning, Clout Maxxing and Seven of Swords, celebrates nine years of Author Diary and revisits He Who Fights With Monsters.
This week, I’ve been working across a few different projects. I’ve made more progress on Seeker’s Reckoning, continued writing Clout Maxxing, and spent time editing Seven of Swords.
I’ve also finally decided what I’m going to do with Clout Maxxing. Rather than leaving it as a wacky side project, I’m going to run it as a Patreon serial, posting a new chapter every week.
There are a couple of personal milestones this week too. My wife and I have now been together for 25 years, and I’ve reached nine years of recording my Author Diary podcast without missing a single week.
On the reading side, I’ve returned to He Who Fights With Monsters after DNFing it earlier this year. This time around, something has clicked, and I’m really enjoying it.
Plus, the usual thoughts on writing, reading and life as an indie author.
Jon Cronshaw’s Author Diary podcast turns nine! More than 470 weekly episodes on writing, publishing and indie author life, from the Wasteland days to today.
This week marks nine years of the Jon Cronshaw’s Author Diary podcast!
Nine years. More than 470 episodes. And somehow, I’ve never missed a week.
When I started recording the podcast back in October 2017, I was still working on my debut Wasteland series. I thought it might be interesting to document my journey as a new author, sharing the ups and downs of writing, publishing, and trying to make a living from telling stories.
I had no idea I’d still be doing it nine years later.
In fact, this anniversary has got me thinking about how much has changed over the past decade.
It was my third attempt at writing a novel, and the first one I actually finished and published.
Looking back, I can see plenty of flaws. There are things I’d approach completely differently today. But I’m still proud of that book. It was the beginning of everything that’s followed.
And what a strange journey it’s been.
Since then, I’ve written more books than I ever imagined I would, created entire worlds, built up several series, and somehow managed to make a career out of something I love.
And all the while, every single week, I’ve sat down to record another Author Diary.
There’s something quite satisfying about that.
Turning Up Every Week
I think writing and podcasting have taught me the same lesson. You just keep turning up and doing the work.
One book becomes two. Two becomes ten. One podcast episode becomes fifty. Then a hundred. And before you know it, you’ve got a back catalogue of more than 470 episodes.
Suddenly, people start calling you prolific.
But from where I’m sitting, it’s mostly just been a case of turning up each week and getting on with it.
There’s a quote often attributed to Bill Gates about how we overestimate what we can achieve in one year and underestimate what we can achieve in ten.
As I’m now approaching a decade since I started taking fiction writing seriously, I couldn’t agree more.
If you’d told me back in 2016 where I’d be today, I don’t think I’d have believed you.
And I’m particularly pleased that I’ve kept the Author Diary going throughout it all. It’s become a record of my writing life, from those early days of figuring out how to write and publish a novel to everything I’m working on now.
The successes, the mistakes, the abandoned ideas, the unexpected detours. It’s all there.
Listen to the Author Diary
If you’ve never listened to the Author Diary, you’re very welcome to join me!
I record a new episode every week, chatting about what I’m writing, what I’m reading, and whatever else is going on in my life as an indie author.
You can find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you normally listen to podcasts. Just search for Jon Cronshaw’s Author Diary.
I also upload the video version to my Patreon every Friday as a public post, so you don’t need to be a paid member to watch.
Whether you’ve been following along since those early Wasteland days or you’ve only recently discovered my books, thank you.
Your support has allowed me to keep doing this, and I never take that for granted.
Here’s to another nine years, many more books, and hundreds more Author Diaries!
Jon Cronshaw reaches 25% of Seeker’s Reckoning, continues his British LitRPG side project, discusses life without Digit and reads Discount Dan’s Backroom Bargains.
This week, I’ve been making more progress on my strange little LitRPG side project. I still don’t quite know what I’m going to do with it, but I’m having far too much fun with it to stop.
I’ve also returned to Seeker’s Reckoning, the third standalone novel in the Ravenglass Guardians series. I’m around 25% into the draft now. This one has a very different feel from the previous books, combining archaeological thriller, jungle adventure and eldritch horror in the Ravenglass Universe.
I also talk about adjusting to life without my retired guide dog Digit and what it’s been like suddenly losing that constant companion from my day-to-day routine.
On the reading side, I’m currently on the third Discount Dan’s Backroom Bargains book. It’s a wonderfully fun series, although at this point I’m starting to suspect it’s deliberately trolling me with all the emotional dog stuff.
Plus, the usual thoughts on writing, reading and life as an indie author.
Looking for books like The Walking Dead? Eight zombie survival novels about ordinary people, broken communities and what it costs to stay human.
If you love The Walking Dead, you probably don’t love it for the zombies.
You love it for the people. Rick trying to stay a good man when being good gets people killed. Carol turning into someone she never expected to be. The prison, the farm, Alexandria: every safe place that falls apart because of what the living do to each other.
Robert Kirkman built the comic on a simple idea: a zombie story that never ends, where the real question is who the survivors become.
The books below share that idea. Each one puts ordinary people under impossible pressure and watches what breaks. Some follow a group on the move. Some build a community and then test it to destruction. All of them should scratch the same itch.
The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor by Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga
Start with the source. This novel tells the story of the man who became the Governor, long before he met Rick Grimes.
When the dead rise, Philip Blake grabs his young daughter, Penny, his brother, Brian, and two old school friends, and heads for Atlanta. The city is supposed to be safe. It isn’t.
The road from there to Woodbury is long and ugly, and every stop strips away a little more of the man Philip used to be.
Kirkman co-wrote it with Jay Bonansinga, and it reads like the comic with the gaps filled in. It is grim, fast and full of the moral rot that made the Governor the series’ most frightening villain.
Read it if you want more of the actual Walking Dead world, and you want to see how the Governor was made.
Melanie is ten years old. Every morning, soldiers strap her into a wheelchair at gunpoint and wheel her to a classroom.
She loves her teacher, Miss Justineau. She loves Greek myths. She has no idea why the soldiers are afraid of her.
When the base falls, Melanie ends up on the road with Miss Justineau, a hard-bitten sergeant and the scientist who wanted to cut her open. The four of them have to cross a ruined England full of “hungries” to survive.
The infection is based on the real zombie-ant fungus, which gives the horror a nasty edge of plausibility. But the heart of the book is a small group of people who do not trust each other, forced to rely on each other anyway.
Read it if you want a road trip through the apocalypse with one of the most memorable narrators in the genre.
In a single morning, nearly everyone on Earth drops dead. A handful of survivors are left standing among the bodies.
Then the bodies get back up.
At first, the dead wander without purpose. But day by day they grow more aware, and they are drawn to any sound or movement the living make.
Moody’s survivors are not soldiers or preppers. They are ordinary British people sheltering in a community centre, then a remote farmhouse, arguing over whether to stay or run.
Read it if the quiet, frightened early seasons of The Walking Dead were your favourite.
This one leans closer to vampires than zombies, but few books capture the community side of The Walking Dead so well.
A secret military project goes wrong, and the infected sweep across America. Nearly a century later, a walled colony in California is still holding out behind floodlights that must never go dark.
The colony has its own rules, its own politics and its own secrets. When the lights start to fail, a young man named Peter has to decide whether to trust the people in charge or the mysterious girl who has wandered in from outside.
It is huge, patient and gripping, with the sweep of a long-running series.
Read it if you love the Alexandria arc and want to see a survivor community generations down the line.
Fourteen years after the dead rose, fifteen-year-old Benny Imura lives in a fenced town and needs a job.
He reluctantly signs up as an apprentice to his older brother, Tom, a zombie hunter Benny thinks is a coward.
Out in the Rot and Ruin, Benny learns that the dead are not the worst things beyond the fence. Some of the bounty hunters out there do far worse to the living.
It is written for young adults, but it pulls no punches, and Tom is a quietly brilliant mentor figure, part Rick, part Daryl.
Read it if you want a coming-of-age story about learning who the real monsters are.
A US naval officer starts keeping a journal as a strange illness spreads.
Within weeks, the world has gone, and his entries turn into a record of survival: supply runs, barricades, close calls and the slow gathering of a few people he can trust.
The diary format makes everything immediate and personal. There is no knowing what happens next, because he doesn’t either.
Read it if you want practical, grounded survival and a small group trying to hold together.
This one is mine, and it was written for readers who love The Walking Dead.
Tommy is a punk guitarist on tour when the outbreak hits mid-gig. His girlfriend and young son are in Philadelphia, three thousand miles away.
With his band falling apart and the roads swarming with the dead, he sets out across a collapsing America in a battered van to reach them.
Like Rick searching for Lori and Carl, Tommy has one goal and no idea whether his family is still alive. Along the way, the people he meets are as dangerous as the dead.
Philip Blake losing himself on the road to Woodbury. Melanie and Miss Justineau trusting each other against every instinct. Peter’s colony running out of light. Tommy driving east because he made a promise.
Every one of these stories asks what survival costs, and whether the people who make it through are still worth being.
Loved The Tainted Cup? Here are six fantasy mysteries with detectives, inquisitors and investigators solving murders in strange, dangerous worlds.
Some fantasy readers want dragons and battles. Others want a body, a locked room and someone clever enough to work out what happened.
Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup proved how many of us there are. A murder mystery set in an empire under siege from sea monsters, it became one of the most talked-about fantasy novels in years. The third Ana and Din mystery, A Trade of Blood, has just arrived, and a lot of readers are now looking for more of the same.
Fantasy mysteries work because the world itself becomes a suspect.
A detective in our world knows the rules. Poison works one way. The dead stay dead. In a fantasy world, the investigator has to work out the crime and the rules at the same time, and the reader gets to solve both alongside them.
Here are six fantasy mysteries for readers who want investigation, deduction and a world full of secrets.
If you somehow got here without reading it, start with the book that set the standard.
A senior officer is found dead in a country house, killed by a tree that has burst out of his body.
Dinios Kol is sent to record the scene. Din is an engraver, altered so he can remember everything he sees. His job is to be the eyes and ears for Ana Dolabra, an investigator who rarely leaves her rooms, wears a blindfold and solves cases from Din’s reports.
The pairing owes a clear debt to Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. Ana is brilliant, rude and impossible. Din is careful, anxious and hiding a secret of his own.
Behind the murder sits the empire itself, a state that survives only because its great walls hold back the leviathans every wet season. Every clue Din uncovers points towards a crime that could bring those walls down.
Read it if you want a fair-play mystery with the scale of epic fantasy.
Sir Konrad Vonvalt is a Justice of the Empire. He travels the provinces as investigator, judge and, when he must, executioner.
The story is told by his clerk, Helena Sedanka, looking back on the case that changed everything. What begins as a murder investigation in a remote town turns into a conspiracy that reaches the heart of the Empire.
Swan was a lawyer before he was a novelist, and it shows. Vonvalt’s power comes from the law, and the law only works while people believe in it. Watching that belief start to crack is the real drama of the book.
Read it if you want a grim, grounded investigation where the detective is also the state.
Touch a body soon enough after death, and he can learn its last thoughts. In the city of Amalo, that makes him a priest, a witness in court and, more often than he would like, a detective.
When a young woman is pulled from the canal, Celehar sets out to find out who she was and who killed her. The search takes him through opera houses, ghoul-haunted graveyards and the quieter corruption of a city that would rather not know.
It is set in the same world as Addison’s much-loved The Goblin Emperor, but it stands alone. It is gentler than the other books here and full of small kindnesses, but the mystery is solid.
Read it if you want a quiet, humane detective in a richly drawn city.
Kos Everburning powered the city of Alt Coulumb: its trains, its water, its streets. Now he is gone, and the city has days before everything stops.
Tara Abernathy is a first-year associate at a firm of necromancers who work like lawyers. Her job is to investigate the death and bring the god back before anyone notices.
This is the first book in Gladstone’s Craft Sequence, and it treats magic as contract law. Faith is currency. Gods can go bankrupt. Murder becomes a matter of liability as well as guilt.
Read it if you want a mystery where the solution depends on understanding how the world works.
Not every fantasy mystery needs a secondary world.
Peter Grant is a probationary constable in the Metropolitan Police. While guarding a murder scene in Covent Garden, he takes a witness statement from a ghost.
That gets him noticed by Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, the last officially sanctioned wizard in England, and Peter becomes his apprentice.
The book is a proper police procedural, full of paperwork, overtime and canteen gossip, except the suspects include river gods and something very old is wearing people’s faces.
Read it if you want a funny, very British urban fantasy that still plays fair as a mystery.
Anselma Versen is a Watcher, a member of an order whose job is to observe events and write the official record. She arrives in the isolated town of Halborg under a false name to look into the death of another Watcher.
The official report says it was an accident. Anselma is soon sure it was murder.
The streets have been scrubbed clean. Witnesses give the same rehearsed answers. Records vanish overnight. Then she finds reports carrying her own signature, authorising operations she never witnessed, dated to days she cannot remember.
Like Din in The Tainted Cup, Anselma is a trained observer. The difference is that the institution she reports to may have already decided what the truth is allowed to be.
The best fantasy mysteries make the investigator pay for the truth.
Din risks his secret. Vonvalt risks his authority. Tara risks her career. Anselma risks finding out that the people she serves are the ones she should be investigating.
In each book, solving the crime means understanding the world: who holds power, how it is used and what the official story is hiding.
That is why the genre works so well. The murder is the way in. The world is the real mystery.
Where to Start With Fantasy Mysteries
For a classic detective double act in an empire under siege, start with The Tainted Cup.
For law, power and a conspiracy that reaches the throne, read The Justice of Kings.
For a gentle, compassionate investigator, pick up The Witness for the Dead.
For a mystery built on magical contract law, try Three Parts Dead.
For a police procedural with ghosts and river gods, read Rivers of London.
And for a murder investigation that turns into a conspiracy written in the investigator’s own hand, try Silent Watcher.
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Silent Watcher is set in the Ravenglass Universe, a world of wyvern riders, fallen empires and institutions that keep more secrets than they should.
If you want to explore it, my free Starter Library gives you five books, five doors into the world, sent straight to your Kindle.
Looking for Viking fantasy books? Seven Norse-inspired epics full of shield walls, blood feuds, dead gods and warriors fighting for their homeland.
Viking fantasy gives you cold seas, longships, shield walls and gods who might be listening.
It also gives you something harder: a world built on oaths. A warrior’s word is binding. A blood feud passes from father to son. Honour is the only thing a person truly owns, and losing it can be worse than dying.
The best Viking fantasy books use that world to ask what a person owes their family, their people and their gods, and what happens when those debts pull in different directions.
Some of the books below are full-blown fantasy, with dead gods and monsters. Others are historical fiction set in the real Viking Age, with only a hint of the uncanny. All of them should suit readers who love Norse mythology and want the north in their fiction.
If you only read one book on this list, make it this one.
Three centuries ago, the gods of Vigrið went to war with each other and destroyed themselves. Their bones still lie across the land. People descended from them, known as the Tainted, carry a trace of their power and are hunted, enslaved or hired as weapons.
The story follows three characters. Orka is a former warrior living quietly with her family until her son is taken. Varg is an escaped thrall searching for the truth about his sister’s death. Elvar is a noble’s daughter fighting for glory with a mercenary warband.
Gwynne writes battles with weight and grief with honesty. The shield walls are brutal, the friendships are hard-won, and Orka is one of the great fantasy protagonists of recent years.
Read it if you want epic Norse fantasy with dead gods, monsters and characters you will follow anywhere.
Prince Yarvi was born with a crippled hand in a culture that worships strength.
He has given up any hope of ruling and is training to become a minister instead. Then his father and brother are murdered, and he is pushed onto a throne he never wanted.
He does not keep it long. Betrayed and left for dead, Yarvi ends up chained to an oar as a galley slave, with only his wits and an oath of revenge to keep him going.
This is the first book of Abercrombie’s Shattered Sea trilogy. It is leaner and faster than his adult novels, but it keeps his sharp dialogue and his talent for characters who win by thinking rather than fighting.
Read it if you want a quick, clever Viking revenge story with a hero who cannot swing a sword.
This is historical fiction rather than fantasy, but no list of Viking stories is complete without it.
Uhtred is born a Saxon lord in Northumbria. As a boy, he is captured by the Danes and raised by Earl Ragnar, who treats him as a son. He grows up loving the Danes, their gods and their way of life.
Then the Danes turn on Wessex, the last English kingdom standing, and Uhtred finds himself fighting for Alfred the Great, a king he does not much like.
Cornwell writes battle better than almost anyone, and Uhtred’s divided loyalty drives the whole series. If you have watched the television adaptation, the books go deeper and darker.
Read it if you want shield walls, real history and a hero caught between two peoples.
Ragnvald Eysteinsson should inherit his father’s lands. Instead, on his way home from raiding, he is betrayed and thrown into the sea to drown.
He survives. Now he has a debt to collect, and a vision that ties his fate to a young king named Harald, who means to unite Norway under one crown.
Ragnvald’s sister Svanhild has her own story. She refuses to be married off for someone else’s advantage, and her choices take her to the other side of the coming war.
Hartsuyker is a descendant of the real Ragnvald, and the book is grounded in the sagas and the history of Harald Fairhair. The fantasy is light: dreams, omens and the sense that the gods are watching.
Read it if you want an intimate Viking saga about family, ambition and loyalty.
A young man with no memory of his past lives in an English village, marked out by a blood-red eye that makes the villagers uneasy.
When Norse raiders led by Sigurd arrive, he is taken prisoner. The Norsemen do not see a monster. They see someone touched by their gods, and they give him a new name: Raven.
What follows is a raid across England with a crew of hard, funny, loyal killers, and Raven’s slow realisation that he belongs with them.
Kristian has a gift for brotherhood. The crew’s banter and loyalty give the violence its meaning.
Read it if you want to sail with a Viking crew and feel like one of them by the end.
For something completely different, let the trickster tell the story.
Joanne Harris retells the Norse myths from Loki’s point of view, from his arrival in Asgard to the end of the world at Ragnarök.
Loki is vain, funny and endlessly self-justifying. He insists he has been misunderstood, and he has a list of grievances against Odin, Thor and the rest of Asgard to prove it.
The myths are all there, but seen through the eyes of the outsider who never fitted in.
Read it if you want the Norse gods with wit and a narrator you should not trust.
This one is mine, and it tells the Viking story from the side of the conquered.
Ragnar Wolfsbane is fifteen and heir to Meerand, a northern land of shield walls, mead halls and stubborn pride. Then the Ostreich Empire invades.
Ragnar watches his father executed. He is taken hostage and forced to live among the people who murdered his family and renamed his home. His younger sister, Maja, is taken to the imperial capital and paraded at court as proof that the Empire civilises its captives.
One sibling learns to survive inside the Empire. The other plots to break free of it. Each believes the other is lost.
I wanted to write about what it costs to hold on to who you are when everything has been taken: your language, your gods, even the name of your home. If you liked the conquered homeland side of Gwynne or Cornwell, this is that story with wyverns and blood-forged ravenglass blades.
The best Viking stories are not really about raiding.
They are about belonging. Uhtred caught between Saxons and Danes. Raven finding a family among the men who took him. Yarvi fighting for a throne that never wanted him. Ragnar and Maja trying to stay themselves inside an empire that wants to remake them.
The axes and longships are the surface. Underneath, these are stories about oaths, kin and what a person is willing to give up to keep both.
For epic Norse fantasy with dead gods, start with The Shadow of the Gods.
For a fast, clever revenge story, read Half a King.
For real history and the shield wall, pick up The Last Kingdom.
For a family saga rooted in the sagas themselves, try The Half-Drowned King.
For brotherhood at sea, read Raven: Blood Eye.
For the myths with a wicked grin, choose The Gospel of Loki.
And for a northern warrior and his sister fighting to survive an empire, begin Ravenglass Legends with The Fall of Wolfsbane.
Start With Blades of Wolfsbane for Free
Before the Empire came, Ragnar fought his first battles.
Blades of Wolfsbane is the prequel to Ravenglass Legends, and it is part of my free Starter Library: five books, five doors into the Ravenglass Universe, sent straight to your Kindle.
Want dragon rider fantasy where the bond with the dragon matters more than a love triangle? Here are six dragon rider books without the romance.
Not every reader who finishes Fourth Wing wants more romance. Some of us want more dragons.
Rebecca Yarros put dragon riders back at the top of the bestseller lists with Fourth Wing. She also turned the subgenre into romantasy for a lot of readers. Search for dragon rider books now, and most of the recommendations come with a love interest front and centre.
That is fine if it is what you want.
But plenty of readers come to dragon rider fantasy for something else. The bond between rider and beast. The terror of the first flight. Aerial battles, military discipline, politics, and the question of what a person becomes when they are tied to a creature that could kill them.
That is the kind of dragon rider story I love to read, and it is the kind I write.
So here are six dragon rider books where the romance stays in the margins or never turns up at all. In each one, the relationship that matters most is the one between rider and dragon.
Will Laurence is a captain in the Royal Navy. During the Napoleonic Wars, he captures a French frigate and finds a dragon egg in the hold.
The egg hatches before they reach port. The dragon chooses Laurence.
That choice ends his naval career. He is sent to the Aerial Corps, a branch of the military that polite society looks down on, and he has to learn a new kind of duty beside Temeraire, a dragon who reads, argues and asks awkward questions about the way Britain treats its dragons.
The heart of the book is the friendship between the two of them. It is warm, funny and fiercely loyal, and it carries the whole series.
The aerial battles are superb too. Novik treats dragons as warships, with crews, harnesses, bombers and riflemen on their backs.
Read this if you want a dragon bond built on friendship and respect, with the feel of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey–Maturin novels.
For a lot of readers, this is where dragon riders begin.
Eragon is a farm boy who finds a polished blue stone in the mountains. The stone hatches. The dragon inside is Saphira, and the moment Eragon touches her, his life belongs to a war he knows nothing about.
The Riders who once kept the peace are gone, destroyed by one of their own. Galbatorix rules as king. A new Rider outside his control is the last thing the Empire will tolerate.
Eragon does take a shine to Arya, an elf, but she wants nothing to do with him, and the book spends its time elsewhere: on Saphira, on Brom’s training, and on the road.
Saphira is the reason to read it. She is proud, sharp and protective, and she talks back.
Paolini wrote it as a teenager, and that shows in places. It is also the opening of the Inheritance Cycle and a modern classic for a reason. Read it if you want the classic chosen-rider adventure told with real heart.
Fire & Blood is written as a history of House Targaryen, from Aegon’s conquest of Westeros to the civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons. Dragons decide wars. Riders decide the succession. When the family turns on itself, dragon fights dragon in the skies over Westeros.
There are plenty of marriages in this book. Almost none of them are about love. They are alliances, bargains and power plays, and many of them end in blood.
It reads like a chronicle rather than a novel, which will not suit everyone. But for readers who want dragon riders as the engine of politics and war, few books come close.
Read it if you want dragons as weapons of state, and a hard look at what happens when one family holds that much power.
Three Sisters, the prequel collection to The Ravenglass Throne, is free in my Starter Library, along with four more books, sent straight to your Kindle.
Annie and Lee grew up on opposite sides of a revolution.
Lee was born into the dragonriding aristocracy that ruled the city of Callipolis. Annie was born to the peasants they ruled. The revolution swept the old order away and took both their families with it.
Now any child can test to become a dragonrider, whatever their birth. Annie and Lee have both made it into the new dragon corps, and both are competing for the title of Firstrider.
Then the surviving dragonlords come back to take the city.
Munda draws on Plato’s Republic, and the politics are the point: propaganda, class, loyalty, and what a revolution owes the people it claims to have freed.
There is some romantic tension between Annie and Lee, but it never takes the reins. Read this if you want dragon riders with the edge of a political thriller.
He is a servant in a dragon order, the lad who carries other people’s kit and dreams of a bond he will never have.
Then he finds a dragon nobody else wanted.
What follows is an underdog story set against the Scourge, a dark plague spreading through the kingdom. Holt has to prove himself to a dragon order that never meant to let him in, while the threat outside the walls grows.
This sits at the gentler end of progression fantasy. You watch Holt and his dragon grow stronger step by step, and the bond between them is the relationship that matters.
Read it if you enjoy progression fantasy such as Will Wight’s Cradle and want a dragon at the centre of it.
This one is mine, and my riders fly wyverns rather than dragons.
When assassins kill the King of Ostreich, his three daughters inherit a kingdom rotting from within.
Irmin is a commander who fights from wyvern-back. Adelinde is a scholar who studies the ravenglass network that binds rider to mount. Elana is a diplomat trying to hold the court together as treachery spreads through the noble houses.
They have not trusted each other in years. To stop the conspiracy, they will have to.
All six of these books get that right. The partnership between rider and dragon carries the weight a romance would carry elsewhere: trust, fear, loyalty, and the dread of losing the other half of yourself.
When that bond is written well, it does not need a love triangle beside it. I explored this in more depth in why we love rider fantasy.
Where to Start With Dragon Rider Books Without the Romance
For friendship and Napoleonic battles in the sky, start with His Majesty’s Dragon.
For the classic chosen-rider adventure, read Eragon.
For dragons as weapons of dynastic war, pick up Fire & Blood.
For revolution and class politics, try Fireborne.
For progression fantasy with a dragon at its heart, read Ascendant.
And for three sisters, a murdered king and a kingdom held together by wyvern riders, begin The Ravenglass Throne with Shattered Kingdom.
Start With Three Sisters for Free
Before the king falls, before the conspiracy, there were three sisters.
Three Sisters collects three prequels to The Ravenglass Throne, one for each of Irmin, Adelinde and Elana. It is part of my free Starter Library: five books, five doors into the Ravenglass Universe, sent straight to your Kindle.
